WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 26 FEBRUARY 2018

30 Paul Henry RHA (1876-1958) LANDSCAPE, WEST OF IRELAND, c.1915-1918 oil on board signed lower left; with Taylor Gallery, Belfast label on reverse 15.24 by 22in. (38.7 by 55.9cm) Provenance: Montague family, County Tyrone, received as a wedding present in the 1940s; Coloured Rain Gallery, Templepatrick; Acquired by George McClelland, Esq.; Taylor Gallery, Belfast; Where purchased by the present owner This is possibly a scene in Achill Island which Henry first visited in 1911. When Henry first went to Achill, from late in 1911 until early in 1914, it was the people who caught his attention, but from around 1915 onwards it was the landscape itself which took his eye. This landscape may be painted from the south of the island. The structure of the landscape suggests that it was painted not far from Grace O’Malley’s castle, close to the nearby cottage where Paul and Grace had wintered in 1914-15. The lower part of the scene is part taken up by the habitation with, in the foreground, the sea and the larger part dominated by the encroaching rain clouds which threaten the already dank landscape. The two parts are united by the upward thrust of the mountain, which is typical of Henry’s compositional method for much of his career. It is a device he first mastered in drawings made during his early years in London (see, for example, his Water Meadows, 1907, Ulster Museum), and which served him well throughout his working life. The simple, almost abstract nature of the composition, the sense of stillness which prevails, and the limited palette employed remind us, too, of Henry’s studentship in Paris under Whistler. The composition is similar to a number of other Henry pictures of the 1920s such as West of Ireland Landscape with Cottages, 1924-5, and The Village by the Lake 1925-30 (all private collections). The handling of the low-lying strip of ground in the distance, with its tiny fields and turf cuttings and, to the rear, a gentle rise which leads the eye to the mountain, and hence upwards to the menacing sky, which is the real subject of the picture, brings a theatricality to the whole scene. There is in Henry’s work, as Seán Ó’Faoláin noted, ‘none of the modern tendency to overplay one’s hand- to force the painter’s personality into the subject, to make all nature and all art nothing more than a vehicle for what is arrogantly called self-expression’. Rather, Henry’s subject-matter remains paramount in importance, over and above his feelings for it, and that is why his work conveys so forcefully a sense of the universal in the scenes he painted. Dated c.1915-18 on stylistic grounds, in S. B. Kennedy’s ongoing cataloguing of Paul Henry’s oeuvre and numbered 1207. Dr S.B. Kennedy January 2018 €80,000-€120,000 (£57,140-£85,710 approx.) Click Here for Large Images & To Bid Lot 30