Anne Madden le Brocquy

Anne Madden died on 20 December 2025 at her home in Dublin, surrounded by her family and carers, according to the family's death notice. She was 93. Some early reports, including Wikipedia, give the date as 21 December, the day RTE News reported her death. No cause of death was made public.

A funeral service was held at Newman University Church, St Stephen's Green, Dublin, on 29 December 2025, and she was buried privately beside her husband. The Arts Council and Aosdana expressed their sadness, with Arts Council chair Maura McGrath calling her one of Ireland's most significant artists. Her son Pierre said she was "the freest spirit" who "carried sorrow lightly and lived deeply."

In October 2026 the Irish Independent reported that probate records showed she had left an estate of more than 6.5 million euro, divided between her sons.

Anne Madden was born in London on 11 June 1932, to an Irish father and an Anglo-Chilean mother. According to the Observer, she had been conceived in Chile but was born in London at her mother's insistence. She spent her first years in Chile, where her father owned a farm, and the family later moved to her father's native west of Ireland when she was a child.

She attended boarding schools in England but was happiest on holidays riding on Exmoor or exploring the Burren in County Clare, with its bare limestone and ancient stone monuments. "It was a most extraordinary country," she said in 2017. "I fell in love immediately." She was fascinated by rocks from the age of nine, when a great-uncle gave her two meteorites.

Her father was killed in a car crash when she was 14. She went on to study at the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts in London. In 1950 she suffered serious spinal injuries in a riding accident and needed three operations, which interrupted her work for several years.

Madden began exhibiting in group shows in London and Dublin from the age of 18, including with the New English Art Club, and from 1954 she showed regularly at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. In 1956 she saw the exhibition Modern Art in the United States at the Tate, and the work of the abstract expressionists opened new directions for her. She later met artists including Joan Mitchell, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Sam Francis.

After her marriage to Louis le Brocquy in 1958 the couple settled at Les Combes in Carros, in the Alpes-Maritimes. Her first solo show, at the Dawson Gallery in Dublin in 1960, was a success, with the Irish Times praising her power to reveal "the bones" of the landscape. In 1964 she won the painting prize at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art for Promontory and was the first recipient of the Carroll Prize, and in 1965 she represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale.

In the 1970s she painted a large series of vertical works derived from megaliths and prehistoric monuments, dark in tone, which she said reflected personal grief and the tragic events in Northern Ireland. In the 1980s she concentrated on drawing, producing the Openings series in graphite and oil on paper, shown at the Fondation Maeght in 1983 and at ROSC '84. The Arts Council of Ireland held a retrospective at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1991, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art held another in 2007.

Later series were inspired by Pompeii, the Odyssey and Icarus, her garden in France and the northern lights, including A Space of Time, a 13 metre composition. In 1994 she painted one of ten large works commissioned by the architect Ronald Tallon for the O'Reilly Hall at University College Dublin, and in 1999 the village of Carros commissioned a 54 square metre vaulted ceiling painting, Empyrius, for its medieval castle, which also has a room dedicated to her work. In 1994 she published Louis le Brocquy: Seeing His Way, a book about her husband. In 2017 the Hugh Lane Gallery showed Colours of the Wind, new works on the myth of Ariadne, and at 91 she had six paintings made during the pandemic exhibited at IMMA.

Madden met Louis le Brocquy while he was working in London, and he visited her daily during her recovery from her final spinal operation. They married at Chartres Cathedral in 1958 and moved to the south of France on medical advice. They had two sons, Alexis and Pierre, and after her sister Vivian and her brother-in-law were killed in a plane crash in 1967 she became guardian to their three young children. Her brother Jeremy also died young, after a fall.

The couple shared a studio for decades and entertained artists and writers including Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon. Madden said she felt overshadowed by her husband's reputation in Ireland but could be her own name in France. They moved to Dublin in 2000, and Le Brocquy died in 2012.

Madden's work is held in many public collections, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Hugh Lane Gallery, the Ulster Museum, the Arts Council of Ireland, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Centre Pompidou, the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Fondation Maeght and the Picasso Museum in Antibes. Her late Seven Paintings, which address the silencing of women from Antigone to Ann Lovett, are in IMMA's permanent collection. She held an honorary doctorate from University College Dublin and was made an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.