| Title: |
Slieve Mor, Achill |
| Artist: |
Paul Henry
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| Size: |
39cm x 56cm
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| Price: |
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| Desc: |
Oil on Board
P.O.A.
Paul Henry (1876-1958)
Landscape, West of Ireland c. 1918-20
Oil on board 15¼ x 22 in. (39 x 56 cm.)
Signed: ‘PAUL HENRY’ b.l.
Provenance: George McClelland, Esq.; thence to a private collection, County Tyrone, in 1972, and subsequently to the Coloured Rain, Gallery, Templepatrick.
This picture possibly represents a scene in Achill Island, the background mountain being Slievemore, which rises to a height of 671 metres. The structure of the composition, with a two-part division of the picture plane, the lower part taken up by the narrow strip of land and the tiny habitation with a lake in the foreground, the upper, and larger, part dominated by the encroaching rain clouds which threaten the already dank landscape, the two parts united by the upward thrust of the mountain, is typical of Henry’s compositional method for much of his career. It is a device he first mastered in charcoal drawings made during his early years in London (see, for example, his Water Meadows, 1907, Ulster Museum), and which served him well throughout his working life. The simple, almost abstract nature of the composition, the sense of stillness which prevails, and the limited palette employed remind us, too, of Henry’s studentship in Paris under Whistler. The composition is similar to a number of other Henry pictures of the 1920s, such as The Village by the Lake, 1924-5, West of Ireland Landscape with Cottages, 1924-5, and The Village by the Lake 1925-30, (all private collections). The handling of the low-lying strip of ground in the middle distance, with its tiny fields and turf cuttings and, to the rear, a gentle rise which leads the eye in recession to the mountain, and hence upwards to the menacing sky, which is the real subject of the picture, brings a theatricality to the whole scene.
Paul Henry was adept at recording the changing weather systems of the West of Ireland. He lived and worked there for a full decade—1910-1919—and thus developed a deep understanding of the characteristics of the weather which blew in from the Atlantic ocean. This was an aspect of his art that his friend Sean O’Faolain noted. ‘I wonder,’ mused O’Faolain, ‘has any other painter, since the medieval Chinese, meditated so intensely on one concentrated subject as [Henry] has done on clouds and hills.’ And he went on, ‘Just as the Chinese used to ponder on rocks and pine-trees, and mountain-peaks, and clouds, until they got the very soul of the wild landscape of China, [Henry] has distilled the anatomy of the West of Ireland to its lovely essence.’ ‘He is a realist and a poet all at once,’ he concluded (O’Faolain, ‘This painter is in love with his model’, unidentified press cutting, 1951, Paul Henry Papers, the Library, Trinity College, Dublin).
There is in Henry’s work, as Sean O’Faolain also noted, ‘none of the modern tendency to overplay one’s hand—to force the painter’s personality into the subject, to make all nature and all art nothing more than a vehicle for what is arrogantly called self-expression’. Rather, Henry’s subject-matter remains paramount in importance, over and above his feelings for it, and that is why his work conveys so forcefully a sense of the universal in the scenes he painted. Landscape, West of Ireland is dated c. 1918-20 on stylistic grounds and is numbered 1207 in S. B. Kennedy’s ongoing listing of Paul Henry’s oeuvre.
S. B. Kennedy
March 2007
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