Paul Henry RHA (1876-1958) CONNEMARA, c.1929-1930 oil on board signed lower left 10¼ x 12¼in. (26.04

Paul Henry RHA (1876-1958) CONNEMARA, c.1929-1930 oil on board signed lower left 10¼ x 12¼in. (26.04 x 31.12cm) Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner's grand-aunt;Thence by descent Possibly exhibited at 'Recent Work by Paul Henry', Combridge’s, Dublin, from 4 August, 1930; Possibly exhibited at 'Dublin Painters’ Society, Dublin, 1-13 February, 1932 Kennedy, S.B., Paul Henry: with a Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, possibly as catalogue no. 737 as Pool on the Bog When Paul Henry first went to Achill Island in 1910 it was to be the central feature of his life. Achill ‘talked’ to him, he later wrote, there ‘seemed no current strong enough to carry me away’ (An Irish Portrait, London, Batsford, 1951, p. 5). To begin with, the local people and their way of life most interested him, but from around 1914-15 he concentrated on the landscape itself. Henry’s treatment of the landscape has a certain monumentality inspiring a sense of timelessness. In it we have the beginnings of a sense of Realism which was new to Irish painting: gone is the Romanticism of much late-nineteenth-century Irish art, to be replaced by a Post-Impressionist-inspired simplicity of concept which stems from Henry’s Parisian training.The brisk handling of paint in the foreground of Connemara suggests that it must date from about 1929-30. The setting resembles the high ground east of Leenane in County Galway, in which case the mountains in the background belong to the range immediately to the south of Delphi, but of this one cannot be certain. The distant mountains, however, which are only gently modelled with light falling on their right, are typical of Henry’s work at this time, as is the sky in which the use of impasto is slight. All of this contrasts with the foreground, where heavier impasto and more spontaneous brushwork have been employed and which increases the sense of recession between the background and the foreground. Also, as can be seen in the foreground and in the sky, the artist has made good use of the surface of the board and its texture as a base for the painting. The upward thrust of the dark turf stacks in the foreground emphasise the mountains behind.Dr S.B. KennedyOctober 2015

ORIENTATION: L