Anne M. Madden (1932 – 21 December 2025) was an English-born Irish painter who was well known in both Ireland and France between which she divided her time after her marriage to Louis le Brocquy in 1958.

Early life

Anne M. Madden was born in London in 1932 to an Irish father and an Anglo-Chilean mother. She spent her first years in Chile, where her father owned a farm. Madden's family moved to Corrofin, Ireland, when she was aged 10. She subsequently moved to London and attended the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts. During that time she met the painter Louis le Brocquy who was then working in London. They married in Chartres Cathedral in 1958 and set up a house and studio in Carros in the south of France, where they remained until 2000.

1950s

Madden began exhibiting in group shows in London when she was eighteen. One of her earliest exhibitions was with the New English Art Club. The Burren and her love of lonely places informed these early paintings. In the late 1950s Madden was impressed by the works of Sam Francis and Jean-Paul Riopelle after viewing their works at the Royal Academy. She later met these artists in Paris along with Joan Mitchell and others with whom she exchanged works. The techniques employed included palette knife and paint flows and soon involved the use of multiple canvases as a means of creating pictorial interactions.

From 1954 Madden regularly contributed works to the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. At the 21st anniversary show, in 1964, she was awarded the painting prize of £150 for Promontory.

1960s

In 1960 Madden had a solo exhibition in the Dawson Gallery, Dublin, which was a resounding success. The Irish Times reviewer commented,<blockquote>"Anne Madden paints landscape with a quite remarkable power to dredge away the soft clothing which covers the land. She reveals the bones, the skeleton, not in the sense that such forms conote decay but rather to recall the simple grandeur which remains in winter snows or when wind has ripped away the foliage."</blockquote>In the mid 1960s on, their comparatively reclusive life in Carros village was changed by the opening of the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul, where over the years they were constantly meeting painters, sculptors, writers, poets, and musicians forming friendships resumed in Paris and elsewhere. Madden was the first recipient of the Carroll Prize in 1964. Madden also had a solo exhibition at the New Gallery in Belfast in the autumn of 1964.

1970s

Between 1970 and 1979 Madden painted a large series of vertical works, their size determined by her height and reach. The works derived from megaliths and other prehistoric monuments were reflections on life and death. These works tended to be hard-edged and dark in tone. Madden stated that they were an overt reflection of The Troubles in Northern Ireland,<blockquote>"They tended to be dark tonally, reflections of grief, of the Irish landscape, of an instinctive search to find or extract light from darkness; elegies of personal grief but also to the terrible and tragic events in Northern Ireland."</blockquote>Madden showed work at the Oireachtas Exhibition in 1971 Madden enjoyed a further one-person show, at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gallery in 1979.

1980s onwards

In the 1980s Madden stopped painting for a time and devoted herself to drawing. This resulted in a series of large works in graphite and oil paint on paper entitled Openings. These works formed the core of an exhibition at the Fondation Maeght in 1983. Three of those works were then displayed as part of ROSC '84 when Madden was one of nine Irish artists invited to show. Madden held a one-woman show of new works at the Taylor Gallery in Dublin in 1987.

In 1990 Madden held a solo show at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, Madden returned to painting on canvas. She continued to develop and produce a large body of work which was presented in an Arts Council of Ireland retrospective in 1991, at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. taking over a property which was once Sarah Purser's studio. Madden who was a naturalist had grown vines and olives in France, which led her to present a collection entitled The Garden of Love at the Taylor Galleries in 2002. Madden showed once more with the Hugh Lane Gallery in 2017 in Colours of the Wind, a series of new works referencing Ariadne's golden thread, which the mythic figure gave to Theseus when he went into the Minotaur's labyrinth.

Her husband Louis died on 25 April 2012. Madden died on 21 December 2025 aged 93.

Legacy

Madden's work can be found in many public and private collections across the globe, including the Ulster Museum, the Arts Council of Ireland collection, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Arts Council of England, Centre National d'art Contemporain Georges Pompidou, Museu Picasso, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris,