James Humbert Craig RHA RUA (1877-1944) COUNTRY LANE WITH FIGURES, 1917oil on canvassigned lower

James Humbert Craig RHA RUA (1877-1944) COUNTRY LANE WITH FIGURES, 1917

oil on canvas

signed lower left; signed again and dated on reverse; also with John Magee & Co. [Belfast] label on reverse

P

20 by 15.5in., 50 by 38.75cm.

This is a very similar painting to A Lane in County Down, painted by James Humbert Craig in 1916 and exhibited at the RHA in 1917. When that picture was offered at Whyte`s on 16 September 2003 as lot 82 Dr S. B. Kennedy wrote:Although J. H. Craig was born in 1877 he began to paint seriously only around 1910 . Thus, while he was thirty-nine in 1916 when he painted this picture, it is, in reality, an early work. In these years, during which he lived with his parents in a large and commodious house, `Craigalea`, at Bangor in Co. Down, his subject matter was in the main drawn from areas close to home, namely Bangor, Groomsport and the shores of Belfast Lough. Only occasionally did he spread his wings to the north Antrim coast and Donegal and those other areas with which he is now so closely associated. A Lane in Co. Down, therefore, marks the end of the earliest phase of his work and looks forward to the whole of his later career…" Both A Lane in County Down and the present work show a touch of the French Barbizon school in both composition and tone. Both are atypical examples by the artist who, as Kennedy notes, "…generally preferred to record with uncanny realism the essential visual effect of a scene. Or, as John Hewitt more poetically put it, to catch `the swift notation of the insistent effect, the momentary flicker, the flash of light, the passing shadow`, attributes which might be regarded as the hallmark of his art. The loose Impressionist palette and brushwork, however, are typical of Craig`s oeuvre in general."