Cecil King (22 February 1921 – 7 April 1986) was famous for his painting Born Rathdrum, County Wicklow, Ireland, King was largely self-taught as an artist. He had his first one-man show in 1959, but worked as a businessman and did not become a full-time artist until 1964. While he began painting in an expressionist style, his mature works have a distinctive cool minimalist formality and often involves clean blocks of even colour cleaved at an acute angle. The break came in the late 1960s. He lived for many years in Blackrock on Idrone Terrace.

A retrospective of his work was held at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in 1981, another was held in the Irish Museum of Modern Art on 27 February 2008.

Work in collections

• Dublin City University:
  • Thrust
• The Arts Council of Northern Ireland:
  • Berlin Painting
• The Arts Council of Ireland:
  • Berlin Painting 21 (1970)
  • Traverse, '84 (1984)
• The National University of Ireland, Galway:
  • Untitled tapestry (1974)
• Trinity College, Dublin:
  • Berlin Painting (1970)
  • Berlin Painting (1971)
• The Tate, London
• The Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin
• The Government Art Collection, UK

References and external links

• Cecil King at Irish Museum of Modern Art
• David Scott (1989), The modern art collection, Trinity College Dublin. Dublin: Trinity College Dublin Press. ISBN 1-871408-01-6