WHYTE'S IMPORTANT IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART MONDAY 22 MARCH 2021 AT 6PM

28 Dr. S. B. Kennedy writes: This picture was acquired by James A. Healy in New York in May 1931 (TCD, MS 7432: 42-48). In the autumn of that year Healy, who with Richard Campbell acted as an agent for Henry, sold it to Frank Shea, an Irish-American. On 12 September 1931 Healy wrote to Henry noting that, with the ongoing financial depression at the time, conditions had ‘gone from bad to worse’ and that business was ‘completely stagnant’. This made the selling of paintings more difficult. Nevertheless, he was optimistic and wanted a list of the pictures that Henry currently had for sale. ‘I believe [he wrote] with this information, we can work along certain lines to stir up interest in your paintings’. The results of his efforts, alas, were disappointing (TCD, MS 7432: 115). In April 1930 a Boston newspaper (unidentified cutting) thought Spring in Wicklow, then on show at Grace Horne’s Galleries, looked ‘as some minor strain of Celtic music might sound’. A year later, in March 1931, the New York Literary Digest noted: ‘Those who know Ireland will recognise the veracity of [Henry’s] ‘Spring in Wicklow’ - the bare blue mountains, the low-lying cottages, the windy sky....the interlacing branches....form a beautiful pattern.’ There is an inscription on the stretcher, ‘Springtime in Wicklow’, but possibly not in the artist’s hand. The arrangement of the cottages in the middle distance, the fall of the ground and the profile of the hills in the background suggest that this is almost certainly the same scene as that represented in The Windy Trees, Wicklow (cat. 686).