Anne Madden

Irish abstract painter whose elegiac works explored grief, myth and human vulnerability

- Patrick Kidd

When Anne Madden was packing up the house in France where she had lived for almost 40 years with her husband, fellow Irish painter Louis le Brocquy, she was drawn to a book of poetry by William Blake. Two lines in particular resonated with her: "I went to the Garden of Love ... And I saw it was filled with graves.

Les Combes, their home in the Alpes-Maritimes village of Carros, had been very much a place of love. Madden often called it "paradise". The couple worked at opposite ends of a large studio and entertained some of art's most celebrated figures - Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró - with homemade wine and olive oil.

Yet Madden also knew great tragedy and spoke of creating "elegies of personal grief" through her art. Her beloved father died in a car accident when she was 14, then her sister, Vivian, was killed in a plane crash in 1967, prompting a series of studies of the megalithic tombs the siblings had known growing up in Ireland. When her brother Jeremy also died young, from injuries sustained in a fall, she was unable to paint until Beckett urged her to "tackle your dark... it's nagging to be said". The result was the Odyssey and Icarus series, in which a small boat or a pair of wings appears almost lost on a vast canvas of colour, a metaphor for the dangers and insignificance we face in life. She also produced works inspired by Pompeii, which she saw as a reminder that death can come unexpectedly.