WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 27th September 2021 at 6pm

42 The size of this piece, painted in oil on a small board, en pleine air in the west coast of Ireland, most likely on Achill Island, County Mayo, belies its importance in the history of Irish art. Arriving in Achill from Paris via London, Henry consciously bids for a place in avant-garde discourses. This little painted sketch in the French tradition of the ébauche captures the freedom of expression and technique so prized by Impressionists and further developed by Post-Impressionism. The disorder of the waving tree and scurrying clouds depicted in this rural landscape, is held firmly within compositional lines radiating from the lower left. Cropped like a modern photograph it depicts an ancient way of life with low-lying thatched cottages huddled together in the shelter of a hill in a traditional clachan layout. They overlook a calm stretch of water bordered by distant mountains with the direction of the wind coming from the Atlantic Ocean to the left indicated by the windblown tree. The overcast sky takes up two thirds of the scene and is broken up by the arching tree rooted in the drystone wall in the foreground that runs alongside a curved path. The cold mauves and blues of the mountains and sky create an objective view and aerial perspective in contrast to the warm unifying intimacy of the underlying umber more clearly to be seen breaking out in the thatched rooftops and in the tips of the tree. Thick oil paint is applied quickly, wet on wet, in short loose directional brushstrokes giving significant form to the emotion aroused by the artist’s return to Connemara, the ancestral home of his maternal O’Flahertys. White paint is applied impasto over the blue greys and umbers mixing to create new tones and skipping to reveal gaps in clouds and branches. A warm, earthy dark brown combination of blues, reds and yellows is to be seen in the outlines of the path, houses, stones and tree. Rejecting Neo-Impressionism and Pointillism in Paris, Henry’s technique was legitimised by the Post- Impressionist writings of Maurice Denis, Roger Fry and Clive Bell. It was also an opportunity for him to support the growing Gaelic League project of regeneration espoused by his brother Robert Mitchell Henry and his long-standing friend Robert Lynd. Whilst firmly based in an observed reality, such scenes became icons, symbolic of a growing independent spirit and at first came under harsh criticism in Dublin but were received more kindly later when Modernist qualities of decoration and flatness became a little more acceptable. More importantly it was an opportunity for Henry to synthesise the spirit of revolt that drove him from Belfast initially and his quest for identity, situating his work within the historical context of Ireland and connecting with theories learnt in France. Dr. Mary Cosgrove September 2021 In 1919 Paul Henry and his first wife, Grace, moved into a studio at number 13A Merrion Row, Dublin. This was to be Paul and Grace’s home and studio. Later, in 1924, he and Grace separated. Since leaving Paris in 1900 he had not had a proper studio, his Achill studio being just a room with poor lighting, but in his posthumous Further Reminiscences (1973, pp.65-6), he left a vivid description of the Merrion Row studio, where he was able to stand back and look at his work: ”It was large, with a top light, and, above all else, had character... What attracted me most about...[it] was the fact that you entered by a green door in a high wall, and found yourself in a cobbled courtyard from which an outside stairway led up to a balcony and the door of the studio... and a very old clematis, in full bloom, covered the whole front. Birds sang in its branches, and I knew at once that I could work and be happy there. In other ways it reminded me of my old Paris studio.”