The painting's stark grey colour palette and its portrayal of dejection within the family unit attracted strong criticism from some contemporaries in post-war Ireland, while others praised the artist's willingness to address the problems of the time in the work.

Depicting a stark human condition in the aftermath of World War II, Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Curator of Irish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland notes: 'The mother, lying on a table, leaning on one arm, stares out with quiet dignity while a menacing looking cat peers out from beneath the draw sheet.

Widely acknowledged as the artist's masterpiece from this period, the painting marks a shift in palette from the comparatively colourful work of the late forties to predominant whites and greys.

This finesse implies - because le Brocquy's motive is always human - a tenderness which is not sentimental, and a sense of wonder which is exact; one thinks twice about the quite ordinary but in fact miraculous construction of any man's back, having looked at the father in the Family.

'[4] Louis le Brocquy explains: 'I have always been fascinated by the horizontal monumentality of traditional Odalisque painting, the reclining woman depicted voluptuously by one Master after another throughout the history of European art - Titians' Venus of Urbino, Velázquez' Rokeby Venus turning her back on the Spanish Court, Goya's Maja clothed and unclothed, Ingres' Reclining Odalisque in her seraglio and finally the great Olympia of Édouard Manet celebrating his favourite model, Victorine Meurent.

My own painting A Family was conceived in 1950 in very different circumstances in face of the atomic threat, social upheaval and refugees of World War II and its aftermath.

Fifty years ago it was painted while contemplating a human condition stripped back to Palaeolithic circumstance under electric light bulbs.

It has become pretentious to talk of an artist's humility, yet that is what distinguishes his work; his studies testify to his patience, and his final, large picture to his refusal to evade simple but difficult problems by relying on the grandiose cliché ...

[10] As notes Dr. Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, ‘The artist's image of stark reality in the shape of the terrifying uncertainty of the post-war era and the resultant isolation of the family unit shocked rather than comforted.

One letter writer to The Irish Times stated unequivocally that the picture in question is as remote from beauty as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive.

The Evening Herald headlined its review "What is it all about" and castigated the le Brocquy exhibition for representing what it called "the left in art" (an oblique reference to modernism).

Le Brocquy's stand and his subsequent development as an artist, however, won him the admiration and respect of intelligent opinion wherever his work has been shown.