Beschreibung:

Artist: Paul Henry RHA (1876-1958) Title: Mountain Landscape with Lake and Road Signature: signed lower left Medium: oil on board Size: 12¾ x 15¾cm (5 x 6.2in) Framed Size: 32.5 x 35.7cm (12.8 x 14.1in) Provenance: Private Collection, USA; Private Collection, Ireland a#morebtn { color: #de1d01; } a#morebtn:hover { cursor: pointer;} Although small in scale, this painting sums up the essence of Paul Henry’s life and art. Creating images of Ireland that are both memorable and iconic, Henry’s depictions of landscapes have served for generations to remind people of the natural beauty of the West of Ireland. He delighted in capturin... Read more Although small in scale, this painting sums up the essence of Paul Henry’s life and art. Creating images of Ireland that are both memorable and iconic, Henry’s depictions of landscapes have served for generations to remind people of the natural beauty of the West of Ireland. He delighted in capturing the colours and textures of distant mountains, turf ricks, quiet lakes and winding roads; elements of landscape that are everyday sights in rural Galway, Mayo, Donegal and Kerry. Henry wove these into deceptively simple works of art that combine a sense of abstraction and painterly skill, qualities that brought him fame as one of Ireland’s leading artists of the twentieth century. Irrespective of whether their ancestry was Irish, collectors in America were often drawn to Henry’s work. This small painting was evidently exhibited in New York, probably in the 1940’s. Although now re-framed, the original light frame bore on the back a stamp, ‘Gramercy Book Shop Inc., 122 East 19th Street’. Founded in 1940 by Robert and Lorraine Wilbur, this well-known bookshop, specialising in European writers and also publishing prints by artists, later moved to Union Square. Born in Belfast in 1876, and raised in a strict religious household, Henry trained at the Belfast School of Art, before moving to Paris, where he continued his studies at the Académie Julian and the Académie Carmen, the latter run by James MacNeill Whistler. In 1900 he settled in London, working as an illustrator and landscape painter. In 1903 he married Grace Henry, who had been a fellow student in Paris. The couple visited Achill Island in 1910 and Henry was so captivated by this remote part of the West of Ireland that he decided to stay on, admitting that he was drawn to the bogs of Achill, by ‘some deep buried ancestral feeling’. His work from this period reveals his debt to Millet and other French realist artists, and over the next decade, he and Grace painted scenes of fairs, people working, and the landscapes of West of Ireland. While figures predominate in his early works, by the early 1920s Henry was concentrating increasingly on pure landscape, capturing the deep blue of mountains, brown bogs and grey stony fields, rugged landscapes dominated by blue skies or rain-filled cumulus clouds. In 1920 he was one of the founders of the Society of Dublin Painters and over the following decades his work was shown in exhibitions in New York, Toronto, Dublin and London. Peter Murray, March 2020