Paul Henry RHA RUA (1876-1958) Connemara Landscape with Tur...

Hammer

€75,000

Paul Henry RHA RUA (1876-1958) Connemara Landscape with Turf Stack Oil on canvas board, 30 x 40cm (11¾ x 15¾'') Signed Provenance: with John Magee's Gallery, Belfast, label verso; with handwritten date 'Dec.'43', stock no.622-33; Private Collection Paul Henry was born in Belfast in 1877 and attended the Belfast School of Art. He travelled to Paris in 1898, where he studied at the Academie Julian and was influenced by the rural realism of Jean Francois Millet. He later moved to Academie Carmen recently opened by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, whose influence can be seen in the present work. In Paris he met his first wife Grace and in 1903 they were married. After a period in London working as an illustrator, Henry moved to Achill Island in 1912, where the local landscape became the main subject for his oil paintings. In 1920 Henry moved to Dublin where, along with his wife and other painters such as Jack B. Yeats and Mary Swanzy, he helped found the Society of Dublin Painters. He stayed in Dublin for twelve years, with frequent trips back to the West of Ireland, and then moved to Co. Wicklow with the artist Mabel Young, who he married in 1954. The present work, which dates to the late 1930s on stylistic grounds, displays Henry’s keen interest in pure landscape. It is taken to a pure form in this work, a simple scene, dominated by the range of grey hued mountains and stratified clouds with subtle pale yellow and off-white tints but this is off-set by the turf stacks, set perilously close to the bogland river that meanders through the landscape. The same turf stacks remind the viewer that the human presence is never too far away and that even a remote Connemara bogland bears the impact of man’s effort to sustain himself. Henry often painted evening scenes, enjoying the changing of the light, as dusk is falling, casting shadows across the landscape. A sense of stillness pervades the scene and he has used a limited palette to distil everything down to the essential elements. Widely considered the most significant Irish landscape painter, Paul Henry’s works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Ireland, Hugh Lane Gallery, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ulster Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris.