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Gerard Dillon: The Making of an Artist
In his early teens, Gerard was highly influenced by Molly and Joe, two siblings determined to pursue creative careers. As a boy, Joe had expressed a desire to be a priest, but in his teens he chose instead to pursue a career as an opera singer. Molly dreamed of being a costume designer and Gerard, who loved drawing and painting, had ambitions to become an artist. Gerard had to settle for a job as a house painter, but he confided to Molly that it enabled him to learn to use paint and colours.
By then, he was a shy 18 year old with a gentle personality and a sense of humour that hid a deep secret. He was gay and troubled by awful feelings of guilt, stemming mostly from a religion that branded homosexual acts mortal sins – the kind of sins that would send him straight to Hell. In an effort to deal with his emotional pain and apparent ‘sinfulness’, he naïvely turned to the Catholic Church for help. During confession in Clonard Monastery, he sought absolution for harbouring deep emotional desires for young men. The priest angrily told him it was not enough to confess his sins. If he did not change his ways, he would burn in Hell for all eternity because his desires were ‘unnatural’. When Gerard explained he could not change how he felt, the priest threatened to physically eject him from the confessional. He warned Gerard that he could be excommunicated. The experience left Gerard disillusioned with Catholicism, and he decided churchgoing was no longer for him.
Feeling trapped on all sides, he followed his brother, Joe, to London where he worked as a house painter and undertook a range of construction jobs, sometimes labouring alongside Joe. It wasn’t long before Gerard learned his older brother was also gay. But it was a topic they didn’t discuss, and Joe denied Gerard access to his gay circle. Gerard later confided in George Campbell that he felt Joe did not want to be responsible for him. Joe was either reluctant to encourage Gerard’s homosexuality or feared Gerard would outshine him in his social milieu. The latter was probably closer to the truth because one of Joe’s boyfriends left him for Gerard soon after they were introduced. The loss, or ‘steal’ as Joe saw it, hurt him deeply and encouraged him to build a fence round his private life.
As soon as Joe returned home to Belfast, Molly and Gerard moved into the same building. They had separate apartments because Gerard wanted his privacy. Life near Molly turned out to be more than he bargained for, and the small price he paid her for his apartment cost him his privacy. Since he was her tenant, she felt she could arrive in his place unannounced, pour herself a drink and sit down. If he was relaxing with a friend in the garden, she would often open her window upstairs and eavesdrop on their conversation. She might make obtuse observations about a bird or a strange cat on the garden wall as a way of inserting herself into their discourse.
Eventually, he managed to escape her clutches by renting an apartment in a quiet, upscale part of London. It gave him more privacy, but it did not reverse his tendency to conduct many of his sexual encounters in the shadows. He also continued to work hard, mostly doing odd jobs. Though he didn’t have much money, he saved what he could to buy paints and canvasses and to travel to the West of Ireland, a place he fell in love with on his first visit there in 1944. After experiencing the Blitz of London, the exquisite landscape of Ireland’s rugged west captivated him.
On 13 October 1944, he wrote a letter to Madge Connolly, a friend in London, containing illustrations. It is a letter I treasure. In it he described a trip he made to Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, with his friend, the artist George Campbell:
Well pet, I got to the Aran Islands for three weeks – my God it was the most glorious holiday I’ve ever had, I think. What a change away from the world, complete and absolute peace, living a very natural, almost primitive life from day to day, not knowing what day of the week it is, hearing no news except a scrap when the boat arrived from Galway once a week … I painted life on Inishmore and had there good luck to sell two watercolours to visitors to the island. It helped me along. We stayed with Pat Mullen who has a lovely house on Frenchman’s beach. He has plenty of books naturally, and some lovely records – the New World Symphony – lots of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius and others and scores and scores of Irish dance music and ballads. We had a few dances in Pat’s during our stay. It was not unusual for Pat to come home at 12.30 a.m. and drag us out of bed to have a dance – bringing along with him a young island girl. There is no woman in the Mullen house – just Pat and his son, PJ, who is a male edition of Barbara. He is great fun and was a wonderful companion, very simple and childlike – with a wonderful sense of humour. He is absolutely unspoiled tho’ he has been in the Merchant Navy.
There was a genuine innocence in the way Gerard described dancing in the early hours to recordings of Irish music. It was something he inherited from his childhood. He liked nothing better than a traditional Irish get-together with music and people reciting passages from their favourite plays. All his life, he had a love for Irish folk ballads and classical music. It was a passion he shared with his brother, Joe, and with George Campbell, who played guitar like a true flamenco musician. In another part of the same 1944 letter, he explained why the West attracted him:
Travelling nowadays is the only drawback. It takes the train (a 3rd rate train too, very uncomfortable) 6 to 7 hours from Dublin to Galway – and later it took the Steamer nine and a half hours from Galway to Inishmore. Of course it was a wonderful experience. They (the islanders) were getting ready for the yearly fair in Galway. The steamer stopped at Inishmore first because it cannot go into the coast because the water is too shallow. So it was wonderful to see the huge Aran men rowing those very fragile curraghs out to the boat – two men rowing and one at the back swimming with a cow – holding on to its horns – poor cow looked so pathetic being dragged through the waves. Then a big rope was placed round their bellies and they were hoisted on board – then another and another. The curraghs came as quickly as they could and no sooner was a cow on board than off they went to make room for another curragh and another cow. And the excitement of the men all shouting to one another in Irish. It was like a foreign country indeed – and their queer mode of dress. Then the same performance at Inishmann (an adjoining Aran island). Some of the Aran men and women came aboard with their belongings to go to the Fair at Galway.
There was a terrific bit of excitement at Inishmann when everything was on board and all the curraghs had gone back but one. It overturned with one man in it and the sea was very high. It looked like the end of it as he was washed away to the back of the steamer, a long way off. These men live in the sea and by the sea, yet they cannot swim. He kept cool and held an oar under each arm – so it kept him up on top. The islanders on board started to keen (wail) and cry in despair, calling loudly to the island where the curraghs had gone back. Then there was a wonderful race by other curraghmen out to rescue him, which they did. So the steamer sailed on to Inishmore. The first few days we felt strange in Pat’s because he didn’t expect us until the end of September. So we did the next best thing – we looked after ourselves with PJ’s help. The islands are desolate – all rock – small, very small fields and stone walls and terrific grey cliffs facing the outer Atlantic – 300ft high – with mountainous waves thundering over them.
Gerard loved the simplicity and ease of the people of the Aran Islands and the community on the tiny island of Inishlacken where he lived with George Campbell. Inishlacken not only captured his imagination but served as an inspiration for some of his most significant paintings. To get a complete understanding of what lay at the heart of his love of the West, one has to look either at his paintings or at his letters, including this unpublished one from 13 October 1944. In it, he both sketched and described the appeal of Connemara’s rocky landscape:
The stony parts are the parts for me. If you closed your eyes and suddenly opened them, you’d think you’d been transported to the moon. It looks as if some strange gods had been playing stone throwing games, like children do, with an old tin can as a cock-shot, until all around is strewn with stones. These god-like stones are huge boulders standing up all over the place, with here and there peeping behind them little cabins and long cottages, white, stark and elfin-like intruders in this strange stone world. The light is wonderful here. Rocks, stones and boulders change colour all the time. Sometimes they are blue green, other times pink, violet, creamy white and cool grey. Behind and around everywhere, the Twelve Pins (Mountain range) tower up to the rolling clouds. They are forever changing colour too, one peak at a time, so that you can see at times a green peak, an orange-brown one, blue black, purple and grey peaks – it’s terrific … a changing landscape … It’s the difficulty to paint this place that makes it so fascinating. It has so much to give. The fields are small and irregular, marked off by lace-like stone walls. Each field can be a different colour. A field yellow with a violet stone fringe, a brown field with a creamy white border, an emerald one with a grey-green wall and so it can go on and on endlessly.
Deep down, Gerard was a romantic, imbued with a deep love of nature and idealism. Had he not been an artist, I believe he would have been an established poet or short story writer, and the West would have featured prominently in his writings. My father had some of his short stories, one of which brilliantly described life in Lower Clonard Street. Sadly, after my father’s death in 2007, those short stories somehow vanished.
My uncle’s landscapes confirm how much he adored the wild, natural simplicity of Ireland’s west and how it contrasted sharply with his depictions of a desolate Belfast and London in the 1940s and 1950s. Decades later, these paintings were the most sought after by collectors, but I personally preferred the later works he created in a surrealistic vein. They employed the compelling images of Pierrots, or French mimes, hiding behind masks. Behind those masks lurked sadness, loneliness and confusion – mirroring Gerard’s own alienation from the world and the confusion he felt in his personal life. Many of the works, mostly oils and collages, exude an emotional power which evokes strong feelings. He depicted his own drama, as well as human folly. He dressed his Pierrots extravagantly, revealing his love of the theatrical and the dramatic.
I did not see much of my uncle when I was a boy, but he kept in touch with my parents, writing letters to my mother and to his brother Joe. I was especially conscious as a child of their preoccupations with mortality and their frequent use of the words ‘cancer’ and ‘coronary’. The death of my paternal grandmother disturbed our family deeply. Francie, as my father and his siblings called her, was a devout woman who refused to take pain medication when she was dying of cancer. She believed her suffering was atonement for her sins, meaning it was potentially a passport to get her through Heaven’s gates.
More tragedy struck when Uncle Joe had a slight heart attack. From that event until his death, he feared he would die at any moment, alone during the night. He visited my parents every evening, staying late to listen to classical music on a wind-up gramophone and drank lots of tea. He would often leave at two or three in the morning.
In 1961, news reached my parents from London that Uncle Gerard was unwell and suffering from chest pains. I was eleven and soon to embark on a career path Uncle Joe had once considered for himself – the priesthood. There was already one priest in the Dillon family whom I had never met, Uncle Joe’s brother, Vincent. He was a Passionist Father, based in Latin America, and he rarely visited Belfast. My mother described him as tall, dark, distinguished and highly intelligent, though she made it clear she was not his greatest fan. She joked he was more like a passionate Father than a Passionist Father.
She was astonished when he strolled around Belfast dressed like a rich, tanned foreigner in a well-cut suit and no clerical collar. The word ‘effete’ comes to mind when I look back on how she described him. My Uncle Gerard’s biographer, the distinguished art historian, James White, told me over dinner in my home in 1991, he was assured by impeccable sources that Uncle Vincent, the priest, was also gay. George Campbell also confirmed it for me. Gerard, Joe and Molly were gay, so the news about Vincent hardly came as a surprise to me. In contrast, however, the two other Dillon brothers – my grandfather, Patrick, and John – were heterosexual, as was their sister, Annie, who immigrated to Canada and died there.
Uncle Joe supported my decision to enter a seminary at Romsey in Hampshire, England. He bought me new clothes and provided my parents with financial support to pay the monthly tuition fees. A decade later, Uncle Gerard shared with me that if he had been living in Belfast when I was eleven, he would have made sure my parents ‘never offered me to the Church’. In his view, the priesthood was not a career for any sane or creative individual.
A major change occurred in Uncle Gerard’s life in 1968. The lease on his London flat expired and George Campbell persuaded him to move to Dublin and buy a house with Arthur Armstrong, a Northern Ireland painter they both knew well. Gerard considered Arthur an ideal companion because he had ‘no notion of marrying’. He and Gerard bought a house in Ranelagh, a short distance from George and his wife Madge’s place. Dublin had a bohemian spirit, as well as a vibrant art scene, and Gerard soon felt much better physically and emotionally living there. That was good news considering a year earlier he had written a sombre letter to my father after being hospitalised for a month with coronary problems. In it, he wrote, ‘I feel like I’ve walked the path of life onto the lane that leads to the tomb. There’s no doubt about that. Looking around me here, I can see that death has put his hand of each of us.’ Living in Dublin meant Uncle Gerard was subjected to daily radio and television reports about the deteriorating political situation in Northern Ireland. At times, the media accounts zapped his creative energy. His presence in Dublin, however, gave me the opportunity to spend some time in his company.
In April 1971, Uncle Gerard visited Belfast to arrange an exhibition of his works in the Caldwell Gallery. While staying with his friend, the pianist, Tom Davidson, he had a mild stroke and spent several weeks in the Royal Victoria Hospital. I visited him there, and to this day I treasure the memory of sitting on the edge of his bed, chatting about my job as a news reporter. He warned me to be careful on the streets and expressed deep sadness about the bitterness enveloping his hometown. I reassured him he would recover quickly and we would soon be seeing each other in his home in Dublin. He tried to appear confident, but I read fear mixed with sadness in his eyes. In a gesture, which spoke to his desire to be walking in the fresh air, he pointed to the daffodils outside his window. Embarrassed by the way the stroke had twisted his mouth, he was happy to have me do the talking. Within a fortnight, he was transferred to the Adelaide Hospital in Dublin, and I travelled with my parents to visit him at weekends. His illness did not dampen his sense of humour because he drew a sketch of himself with tubes up his nose. During one of my visits, he was thrilled to learn his Belfast exhibition was a huge success.
‘How is Moneybags?’ he asked me when I walked into his hospital room one morning. It was his nickname for George Campbell, who had a knack of selling more work than Gerard. I told him George was fine and had promised to visit him despite his phobia about hospitals.
‘That’s not the only phobia he has,’ noted my uncle, in no way offended by George’s unwillingness to visit him. George did indeed have many phobias, though perhaps that is not the best way to describe some of his eccentric behaviours. Each morning, even in late spring, he insisted on wearing a jacket before he sat down to a breakfast of tea and toast with honey, followed by a Spanish cigarette. He would complain about Dublin’s air, saying it ruined his sinuses and gave him chills unlike the clean air of Spain, where he lived four to six months annually. After breakfast, he used to put on his beret and fill his pockets with old batteries to throw at neighbourhood dogs while he strolled to the centre of Ranelagh to buy the Irish Times. He disliked the mutts who poked their heads between garden fences to bite him.
When I was in public buildings with George, he always refused to use lifts, complaining he suffered from claustrophobia. He made me promise to make sure when he died he was ‘really dead’ before anyone put him in a coffin. He was afraid of being buried alive. In the event of his demise, I should install a window in his coffin lid and place in his hands a bottle of John Powers Gold Label whiskey and a glass. Then I should insist his coffin be buried upright with the window visible above ground to assure friends he had entered the afterlife with ‘the right priorities’. Hospital visits and wakes rated highest on his list of phobias.
One afternoon, the hospital allowed Uncle Gerard to leave for a few hours. At his request, my father and I drove him into County Wicklow to see Sugar Loaf Mountain. He was frail and did not talk much. At one stage, he asked me to buy him an ice cream, saying it would remind him of his childhood when ‘a day out was only special if there was ice cream’. That got me talking about my childhood in Belfast and how I loved a shop in Sandy Row where the owners displayed a massive, beautifully decorated chocolate egg in the window every Easter. Uncle Gerard loved storytelling and wanted to hear more of my childhood memories. That afternoon, all of a sudden he nudged me.
‘Tell me the one about the perfume,’ he said.
It was a story my mother had told him years before, but he wanted to hear my version of it. I began describing how as a boy I saved the few pence or shillings I earned for cutting sticks for my grandmother’s fire and running errands for my elderly aunts and their friends. In January 1959, I began saving earnestly to buy our mother a special Christmas present as a thank you for her hard work and kindness. I decided I had found the perfect gift for her when I spotted a bottle of perfume in a chemist’s window in Albert Street. I passed by the shop at least once a week to make sure it was still there.
One day I plucked up the courage to go into the chemist. Instead of asking for the price, I announced I was going to buy it for my mother for Christmas. I must have impressed the shop assistant and shop owner because they waved pleasantly to me when they subsequently saw me passing by. A week before Christmas, I counted my pennies and shillings, which I had successfully hidden in a box on the roof of our outdoor toilet. But the moment I came within sight of the chemist, my hands began to tremble. What if the perfume cost ten times what I had saved? There was nothing for it but to seek Divine help. So I made a beeline for St Peter’s where I said a decade of the rosary. By the time I left the church, I was brimming over with confidence, which evaporated the moment I walked into the chemist’s.
‘You’re here for the perfume for your mother,’ said the owner. I nodded and spread out my assortment of coins. When I had placed them in an order of value, the perfume was packaged and handed to me. I whispered ‘thank you’ and left as quickly as my legs would carry me. On Christmas Day I gave my mother the gift. She gasped when she opened the package.
‘Gerry, I can’t believe it. There must be a mistake. Maybe you should go down to the chemist,’ she told my father.
Two days later, he went off with the perfume and returned grinning from ear to ear.
‘There is no mistake. Your son bought it,’ he said.
When my mother unwrapped the package a second time, to my horror I saw it was not the bottle of Chanel No 5 I had been admiring all year, but my mother didn’t seem to care. I discovered later the shop owner told my father he knew I wanted the Chanel No 5, but thought my mother would be pleased with a less expensive but fashionable product. When I subsequently told my mother what I thought I had bought her, she said forever more she would remember only that I bought her Chanel No 5. Uncle Gerard loved the story, and it struck me his attachment to it was connected to the love he had for his mother.
Weeks after enjoying his company on the car ride, his condition appeared to improve. There was even talk of him going to London to stay with friends, and my father said he would accompany him. Sadly, on 12 June, his condition deteriorated, and he asked for a priest to hear his confession and give him the Last Rites. He died on 14 June, and in accordance with his wishes was buried in Milltown Cemetery, Belfast. He had stressed throughout his life he did not wish to be buried in a neat, tidy cemetery of the type he associated with London. Milltown was the antithesis of that.
In the aftermath of his death, decisions were made, which I feel should be known, especially to those who may write about him at some time in the future. During the final year of his life, he worked hard, using a large press to make etchings. Presumably, the strain of using the heavy press contributed to his declining health, especially in the spring of 1971. He never finished his etching series. But according to James White, who produced an illustrated biography of Gerard a short time after his death, the artist, Arthur Armstrong, who was sharing a house in Dublin with my uncle, spoke to John Kelly, Director of the Graphic Studios where Gerard worked. Kelly told Arthur there were more than fifty plates Gerard had etched and they ‘should be cancelled by scratching an X across each plate so if anyone wanted to make a print in the future the mark would show’. I never saw the fifty plates, but I did see plates my father later had in his possession, which were from a small series Gerard had all but finished. Arthur Armstrong convinced my father, in his capacity as one of Gerard’s heirs, to scratch those plates so they could never be used again. According to Armstrong, Gerard had always felt that when European artists died, they left behind plates that were used to create prints much like hand bills. It was Gerard’s philosophy anyone who bought a painting, drawing, watercolour or etching by him should be able to recoup their outlay by selling it in an emergency. I vehemently opposed the destruction of those plates, even when my father insisted he knew Gerard’s mind. My father said he was doing it on the advice of Armstrong. My father made X scratches across the plates and later gave them to my brother, Dr Patrick Dillon.
When I went to Uncle Gerard’s house after his funeral, I found someone had rifled through his belongings. His sister Molly thought it was George Campbell’s wife, Madge, looking for Gerard’s will, concerned about how it might impact the life of Arthur Armstrong. According to Molly, Madge was anxious to find out if Gerard had left his part of the house to Arthur, who was not in a position to pay the market value for Gerard’s half of it if it was not bequeathed to him. By viewing the will, argued Molly, Madge would be better placed to give Arthur advice. There was no evidence to support the allegation, though Madge declared after my uncle’s passing she would do whatever was necessary to protect Arthur’s rights. Uncle Gerard had promised my parents they would inherit everything he had. Weeks before his death, he told my mother he had written a will but none was found when we searched his possessions. Everyone in the Dillon family was convinced my uncle had intended to leave everything to my father, and they left my father to sort out Gerard’s affairs. My father allowed Arthur Armstrong to buy out Gerard’s 50 per cent interest in the house at a knock-down price.
All Molly wanted from her brother’s estate was twenty-five oil paintings from Gerard’s West of Ireland period. My father simply gave her the works, but she then insisted on having his diaries. I was first to read the diaries in the days after my uncle’s death. My father read them much later and, contrary to my advice, erased all comments in them about Molly and Vincent, hoping to save them embarrassment. He also blacked out criticisms directed at some leading figures in the Dublin art world. On learning of the dairies, Uncle Gerard’s brother, Fr Vincent, who was by then retired and living in Texas, asked Molly to send them to him. I suspected then, and still do, he was anxious to discover if they contained any scandalous revelations about him. Because of this, his relationship with my parents suffered when the diaries were passed to Molly. The rift between Vincent and my parents was so deep he never got his wish to be buried in Belfast with Joe and Gerard.
Molly subsequently claimed she sent the diaries to Fr Vincent Dillon, but there was no proof she ever did. I was not made aware of everything my father erased in the diaries. I believe there were at least two journals that were undated. I told my father I was sure Molly returned to London in the weeks after my Uncle Gerard’s death with one or two of these journals, which were additional to the ones my father passed to her months later. My father did not wish to challenge her. When she learned that the diaries I read in the days after my uncle died contained revelations about his sexuality, she demanded them from my father. I never saw those writings again.
In fact, no one in my family ever saw the journals after they were in Molly’s hands. She was evasive when I asked her about them a decade later. When I pressed her, she hinted they had been destroyed, although she refused to be specific. They were not among her possessions after her death, and there was no evidence Fr Vincent ever had control of them. It is possible Molly lied about having sent them to her brother in Texas. She may have destroyed them because she was reckless with some of Uncle Gerard’s possessions. While sorting out papers and art works in the days following his funeral, she lit a small bonfire in his garden and proceeded to burn letters and more disturbingly drawings, which she felt did not measure up to his talent. She was a single-minded, capricious and wilful woman. She was the type of person one could not reason with, a fact Gerard found out to his cost when he lived with her in London.
Before Uncle Gerard’s death, his Dublin art dealer, Leo Smith, launched a clever ‘wine-and-dine campaign’ to court my parents, certain they would inherit a large art collection. Leo owned and ran the Dawson Gallery, one of Dublin’s finest and most celebrated galleries. He was a shrewd, sophisticated man with a wealth of knowledge of the art world, having worked for years in Bond Street in London. According to George Campbell, the fact he was gay partly determined his close, personal rapport with Gerard. When Leo dined with my parents, he sometimes exhibited his artsy, bohemian side and treated my mother in particular to scandalous stories and risqué jokes about well-known Dubliners. He adored the letters she wrote to him and was fond of quoting lines from them to business acquaintances. He convinced my father if anything happened to Uncle Gerard he was the person to secure his legacy. It would be important he stressed, to ensure only one person managed and sold the work Gerard left behind. It was clear from Leo Smith’s comments to my parents that my uncle had told him he was bequeathing his work to my father.
Leo explained to my father he had handled the estate of Jack Yeats and other prominent artists. In the process, he learned that when an artist died his reputation went into decline because the market was flooded with his or her creations by heirs determined to make a quick buck. As a consequence, the value of the work plummeted, and the artist’s reputation suffered for decades or in some cases went into a serious decline. Gerard’s legacy would be assured only if his paintings were released for sale over time to maximise interest in them, thereby enhancing their value. As Leo put it, the ultimate goal was to honour Gerard by ‘handling his work in a fashion that solidified his place in the history of Irish art’. The logic appealed to my father, who loved Gerard and always wanted him to be considered one of Ireland’s ‘greats’. Shortly after Uncle Gerard’s death, my parents told me they were convinced Leo had the ability and respect for my uncle to handle the art he left behind. Clearly, Leo Smith’s campaign in the months before my uncle’s passing had proved successful.
What happened next constitutes, in my opinion, one of the hidden scandals of the Irish art world. On learning my father had given Aunt Molly twenty-five oil paintings, Leo Smith flew right away to London and bought them from her at a knock-down price, knowing she was living on a pension and needed the money. This angered me when I found out about it years later. Leo’s main objective, however, was to get his hands on the rest of the art Uncle Gerard left behind. He persuaded my father, against my judgment and that of a close family friend, who also happened to be a lawyer, that he was ready to buy the work and do all the wonderful things only he could do with it. Of course, he would have to get it at the right price, he pointed out. Hundreds of works were removed from Gerard’s home and transferred for safe keeping to the Killiney home of a leading Dublin solicitor. They included major oils, watercolours, drawings and mixed media. In the meantime, Leo Smith put in motion a strategy to ensure he could purchase them at a price that suited him. He began by enlisting the help of his friend, James White, an international art expert and former director of the National Gallery of Ireland. White, who would later publish, Gerard Dillon – An Illustrated Biography, knew and personally admired Gerard’s work to the extent most people deemed him the sole expert on him. It was a clever move by Smith because any valuation by White of Dillon’s works would not be challenged should my father decide to seek an alternative valuation from another expert. Leo Smith, I believe, was confident my parents and Gerard’s sister, Molly, would not question White’s judgment. He was right.
White subsequently valued the work in a way that ensured Leo Smith acquired it for a ridiculous price. I recall seeing White’s valuation document and being appalled by the prices he attached to some of the work. Etchings, for example, were listed at fifty pence. I am confident a copy of White’s valuation, as well as numerous other documents related to my late uncle’s life and work, were among my father’s possessions before he died in 2007. For the purpose of this book, I asked the executors of my late father’s estate, my brother, Dr Patrick Dillon and my sister, Ursula Mc Laughlin, about the archive of documents related to Uncle Gerard. They told me no such archive existed even though I had seen parts of it with my own eyes.
My father could have bought the Dillon collection instead of permitting Leo Smith to purchase it. In fact, a family friend offered to loan him money to buy it, but by then Smith had done a marvellous job of convincing my parents and Molly only he could deliver Gerard Dillon’s proper legacy. I cannot be exact about the overall value placed on Gerard’s work, but I believe it did not exceed £6,000. Not long after Leo Smith acquired the collection he died on his way from a funeral in Dublin. Ironically, he left no will and the collection was passed to his heirs to sell as they saw fit.
Before James White died, I had an opportunity to talk to him about my uncle’s unusual relationship with Leo Smith. I remarked how George Campbell had, once or twice, hinted that there was much more he could say about it. White smiled in a way that suggested he was the keeper of secrets. He admitted that Leo and Gerard shared a habit of ‘cruising’ for lovers in Dublin’s docks area. He suggested they may even have done this together on some occasions. According to White, Leo and Gerard were very close but had never been lovers, even though Leo loved and desired a physical relationship with Gerard. Unlike Gerard, Leo was indiscreet and liked to confide in White. Gerard was secretive. White admitted my uncle never opened up to him about his sexuality. I have often wondered how and why White became Leo’s ‘confessor’. One thing that stands out about White is how he genuinely feared, when writing the book on my uncle, that if he spilled all his secrets about Leo and Gerard, he risked being ostracised by his contemporaries. Nevertheless, he managed during his research for the book to encourage close friends of Gerard’s to talk to him off the record about matters that had remained hidden for decades, including the closeted lives of Gerard’s siblings, Joe, Molly and Vincent. I regretted that White lacked the tenacity to publish what he learned, knowing it could help future art historians.
