WHYTE'S EXCEPTIONAL IRISH ART MONDAY 7 DECEMBER 2020

44 32 Paul Henry RHA (1876-1958) THE BLUE HILLS OF CONNEMARA, 1933 oil on canvas signed lower right; titled in pencil on stretcher on reverse 20 by 24in. (50.8 by 61cm) Frame Size: 29 by 33in. (73.7 by 83.8cm) Condition: This work appears to be in excellent condition. Provenance: Combridge Gallery, Dublin; Where acquired by Eustace Shott in the late 1940s; Gifted by the Shott family to the father of the present owner Literature: Kennedy, Dr S.B., Paul Henry: Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p.263, catalogue no. 818 (illustrated) €200,000-€300,000 (£177,780-£266,670 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot32 Dr S.B. Kennedy notes in his catalogue raisonné on the artist that the present work is, ‘inscribed with the title and date on reverse. Reproduced as a colour print by the Combridge Gallery, Dublin, c.1937. There is a sense of agelessness to the work of Paul Henry that has endured the test of time and trends. From the period of 1929 to 1933 - when the present work was painted – Paul Henry’s reputation in Irish art was secured and this was partly as a result of the mass distribution of tourism posters incorporating images of his works as well as the sale of photolithographic prints from his original oils, many of which were sold through Combridge’s Fine Art, Dublin from the 1930s. Kennedy notes that, …”By the late 1920s he had, almost single-handedly, defined a way of seeing and an attitude towards the Irish landscape that was convincing, would endure and which, in part, helped to formulate a popular vision of Irish identity. Added to this he had introduced a degree of realism to Irish painting that was to prove influential on a number – one might almost say a ‘school’ – of followers, of whom his fellow Northerners James Humbert Craig and Frank McKelvey are perhaps the best remembered…The views and attitudes established by these artists usually depict a rural world of men and women at ease with themselves and their surroundings; it was widely projected in publications of the time, for example Saorstát Eireann, Irish Free State Official Handbook”which was published in 1932, the year before the present work was painted. It was of course fantasy, but it endured. Perhaps it was necessary, for after 1922 the new state urgently required a sense of identity and cultural history that would link its ancient past in a morally unbroken way with the present. Thus, with the subsequent espousal of the West in particular the landscape qua place suddenly assumed an importance it had never had before… In this process, Henry’s work fitted the bill beautifully.” Fig. 1 Sheephaven, Donegal, Ireland For Holidays Poster, c.1920s. Published by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Paul Henry's modernist landscape paintings lent themselves to reproduction as posters; he was commissioned to produce several from 1925 onwards, and some of his designs were still in use in the 1950s. Bord Fáilte – the Irish Tourist Board - also used reproductions of some of his paintings in the 1960s to 1970s.