John Montague is one of Ireland's leading poets. Born in Brooklyn in 1929, he was brought back to his parents' farm in county Tyrone at an early age. His father remained in New York, where he worked for many years on the IRT. Montague went to school in Tyrone and afterwards studied at University College Dublin, Yale University and Berkeley. He taught in the late 1960s at Berkeley and the University of Paris. His first book of collected poetry, Poisoned Lands and other Poems, as published in 1961. Other collections followed: A Chosen Light (1967), Tides (1970), The Rough Field (1972), A Slow Dance (1975), The Great Cloak (1978) and The Dead Kingdom (1984). He edited The Faber Book of Irish Verse in 1974, and has published two works of fiction, Death of a Chieftain (1964) and The Lost Notebook (1984). Montague has played a leading role in the renaissance of contemporary Irish culture. Death of a Chieftain was the inspiration for Garech de Brœn to name the group of traditional Irish musicians he formed in 1963. The Chieftains have since made the best of Irish music well known in Europe, Australia and America. Montague has been a close friend of Barrie Cooke for many years, and contributed an essay to the catalogue of a retrospective of the artist's work held at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in 1989. This portrait was commissioned specially by the Crawford Gallery from Barrie Cooke, as part of a growing collection of portraits of Irish writers by Irish artists. Montague's Collected Poems appears in 1995.

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Lit. - Dunne, 1986 / Dunne, 1992