Paul Henry, R.H.A., R.U.A. 1876-1958

Executed circa 1935-36, the present work is most probably the composition that Henry included in his 1936 Toronto exhibition. Certainly the brisk handling of the paint, the sense of freshness and the light palette suggest a date of execution of around that time. While the setting cannot be identified, it is almost certainly Connemara.

Following a period of personal turmoil in the late 1920s, Henry’s life became more settled in the early and mid-1930s, and this change is reflected in his mood and hence in his palette. This picture positively reeks with the freshness of the breeze that sweeps across the landscape, stated in the transient nature of the cloud pattern in the sky. The brushwork, too, has been swiftly applied, with a directness and assurance that recall the injunction to his students of Henry’s onetime teacher in Paris, Whistler, that they should observe things in simple, direct terms and set them down harmoniously in closely modulated tones, an approach which underpins much of Henry’s best work. Henry absorbed Whistler’s instruction and it stood him in good stead throughout his career and never more so than in that late flowering of his work, the group of pictures done in 1939 for Sean  O’Faolain’s book, An Irish Journey (London, Longmans, Green, 1940). Indeed these pictures, and others of the period such as Maam Valley II (lot 64) and the present work represent the last creative urge of Henry’s art, for within a year or two he suffered an illness which led to almost total blindness and thus the end of his painting career.

We are grateful to Dr S.B.Kennedy for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of this work which is numbered 919 in his forthcoming catalogue of Paul Henry’s Drawings, Paintings and Illustrations.