Louis le Brocquy was born in Dublin in 1916. His initial training was as a chemist, and until 1938 he worked for the family business, the Greenmount Oil Company. Although largely self-taught as an artist - he spent much time studying in museums in London and Paris - le Brocquy is recognised as probably the most accomplished Irish artist working today. He has evolved a style that is spare and delicate, his early training as a scientist still evident in the careful consideration which he brings to his art. Although his early paintings were inspired by Cézanne and the Cubists, his more recent work counterpoints precise brushwork with elusive, inspired mark-making. His consummate mastery is shown in this specially commissioned triptych of portraits, depicting the three major Irish writers of the twentieth century.

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906 and educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen and Trinity College Dublin. He left Ireland in the twenties for Paris, where he remained all his life. He published many novels, stories and poetry, but achieved fame only when his play Waiting for Godot was performed in 1953. Thereafter, he gained recognition as perhaps the greatest prose writer of the twentieth century - a novelist as well as a playwright - and one who wrote mainly in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, the third Dubliner to receive the accolade. He died in Paris in 1989.

Le Brocquy has written about his portraits of Beckett:

As we know, since the Renaissance and until the turn of this century our imagery has remained very largely perceptual, outward-looking and evidently equated with exterior phenomena. But during long periods it was thought that reality was to be found rather within the mind and within those conceptual, interiorised images of a world transformed.

Still today perceptual imagery, based on the photograph, may be said to remain the official and popular norm. Nevertheless a profound change has occurred and, since the turn of the century, the painter has been insistently aware of those renewed conceptual tendencies which have been characteristic of paintings in our time. Likewise in literature, Beckett, while still in his twenties, expressed '...awareness of the new thing that has happened, namely the breakdown of the object... [the] rupture of the lines of communication...', and '...the space which intervenes between [the artist] and the world of object...'