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Paul Henry RHA (1876-1958)
PORTRAIT OF AN ELDERLY LADY, c.1904-1905
charcoal
signed lower left
21½ x 15in. (54.61 x 38.10cm)
Almost certainly drawn for the newspaper, To-day’s ‘Types’ series which Henry worked on in 1904-5. In
1902 Ladbroke Black, a close friend of Henry’s, left the Morning Leader and joined the weekly journal To-
day as joint editor with Frank Rutter. Founded in 1893 by the novelist and playwright Jerome K. Jerome
(1859-1927), To-day had a literary bias and therefore scope for original illustrations. Black gathered
around him on the paper a number of friends, including Paul Henry, Robert Lynd andWalter Riddall, and
so gradually the mantle of To-day was cast over them all. Paul Henry did illustrations, Lynd contributed
essays, criticism and gossip, and Riddall wrote short sketches and book reviews. For his contributions
Lynd was paid thirty shillings a week, so presumably Paul Henry earned a similar amount, an adequate
wage by Edwardian standards. In the autumn of 1904 Henry began a series of illustrations called ‘Types’,
for To-day. The Unfortunate, a drawing of an elderly pauper reading a paper by the Thames embankment
at dusk first appeared on 5 October 1904, and was followed by The Grandmother (2 November), The
Stick-Gatherer (9 November), The Ballad Singer (16 November), The Crank (23 November) and others.
All of these drawings show Henry’s debt to Whistler, his former teacher in Paris, and, indeed that he
continued to admire Whistler is evident from his attendance at the latter’s funeral on 23 July 1903.
Henry’s spell of full-time employment on To-day ended about 1905. This may have had something to do
with Frank Rutter’s leaving the paper to become art critic for the Sunday Times or, perhaps more likely,
Paul simply grew tired of the repetitive routine, for throughout his life he disliked working to order. In
any case he now began to work for a number of clients. Portrait of an Elderly Lady must date from about
1904-5, although its date of likely publication in To-day is not known.
It is numbered 110A in S. B. Kennedy’s ongoing cataloguing of Henry’s oeuvre, and is similar in style to his
Head of a Woman, also of c. 1904-5, reproduced in Kennedy, 2007, number 126, p. 125.
Dr S.B. Kennedy
August, 2016
€10000-€15000 (£8550-£12820 approx.)
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