Alicia Louisa Letitia Boyle RBA, RHA, RUA (1 August 1908 – 11 January 1997) was an Irish abstract marine and landscape artist.
[1] When her Mother died and her Father remarried, Boyle felt unable to remain in the family home and left to live in a bedsit.
Having viewed Hokusai's work at the British Museum and also in attending the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, Boyle began to draw with a quill and ink.
She won a commission to produce a mural for the Nurse's Home at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children two years later, which is no longer extant.
The resulting works were shown in an exhibition in Athens which financed a two-month painting expedition to Italy before she returned to England before the outbreak of World War II.
During this time Boyle designed stage-sets for ballets and plays by Tolstoy, Shaw and Shakespeare[1] She later secured a post at Northampton Art College where the actor Jonathan Adams numbered amongst her many students.
Boyle held her first solo exhibition in the Peter Jones Gallery in London in 1945, which afforded her the luxury of reducing her teaching hours.
[1] As the decade drew to a close Boyle became inspired by her native land after visits to Donegal and Connemara when she began to portray Irish subjects and scenes.
[11] Her literary inspirations at this time were Marcel Proust, García Lorca, and later Frank O'Connor, Flann O'Brien and Seamus Heaney.
[17] The Scottish Committee of the Arts Council welcomed an exhibition of Contemporary Ulster Painting to Edinburgh where Boyle showed alongside George Campbell, Gerard Dillon, Paul Nietsche and Nevill Johnson.
[27] Boyle was inaugurated into the National Self Portrait Collection of Ireland in 1995, alongside twelve others including Joseph O'Connor, Sidney Smith, Anna Cheyne and George Russell.