Robert Henri 1865 - 1929

Robert Henri first turned his artistic focus to portraiture as early as 1900 (concurrent to his joining William Merritt Chase on the faculty of the New York School of Art), but these portraits were not nearly as commercially successful as his earlier Parisian street scenes. Nevertheless, he remained committed to developing a distinct style of realism which most effectively communicated the individual character of his sitters. In particular Henri revered children, writing, "I have never respected any man more than I have some children. In the faces of children I have seen a look of wisdom and kindness expressed with such ease and certainty that I knew it was the expression of a whole race" (The Art Spirit, published posthumously in 1939, p. 242).

During the 1920s, Henri and his wife Marjorie made several trips to Ireland's scenic western coast. The artist first visited there in 1913, renting Corrymore House, located outside the village of Dooagh, and made agreements to purchase the house in 1924. The children Henri encountered in the local villages in Ireland possessed an unconventional aesthetic beauty that proved to be irresistible to an artist striving to capture the purest essence of his sitters and their unaffected dispositions. Untitled [Alanna], or Shy Girl as it became known later, is among Henri's last paintings, done in 1928 in Achill Island, Ireland. Henri's children reveal a kindness and purity he believed was "an antidote to the evils of over sophistication that stifled man when he reached adulthood" (William Inness Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle, New York, 1988, p. 249).