Anne Madden

Anne Madden (London, 1932 – 2025) was an English-born Irish painter who divided her time between Ireland and France. Her abstract work, closely tied to landscape, is held in many public and private collections, among them those of the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre.

The daughter of an Irish father and an Anglo-Chilean mother, she spent her first years in Chile and, as a child, moved to Corofin in County Clare. She studied at the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts in London and began exhibiting in group shows while still a teenager. In 1958 she married the painter Louis le Brocquy, and the couple settled in Carros, in the south of France, until 2000.

Her early paintings drew on the landscape of The Burren and on American abstract expressionism, which she encountered in London. In the 1970s she painted a large series of dark, vertical works, inspired by megaliths and reflecting on life and death, which also alluded to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. After a period devoted to drawing in the 1980s, she returned to canvas and later settled in Dublin.

Her legacy lies in the presence of her work in Irish and French institutions, and in the permanent room that the castle at Carros dedicates to her work.