IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1 DECEMBER 2025

48 The atmospheric Whistlerian liminality is underpinned by the artist’s customary strong classical composition. The lines of the mountain tops radiate from the lower left and are criss crossed by lines of the tree and the wall from the lower right. A vertical and horizontal golden section is used to contain the beauty amidst a terrain needed to be recognisable in a time and place when land and annuities were fiercely debated. Henry often sketched outdoors in the early morning, the realistic topology being a consistent element in his practice and playing a large part in why his work was sought after. Familiar scenes served as signifiers of identity and aspiration. 1 In this painting, executed when he had gained recognition at home and internationally, the foreground is well defined with neutral objects such as the trees and stones unlike the early works in which they were less well defined. The windswept tree often to be seen on the Irish coast is regularly used by Henry in his paintings dating back to his early charcoal drawings. 2 The sense of movement contained in the tree opposes the static calm of the nonerosive quartzite Sugar Loaf which came originally from the deep seabed. In this Great Sugar Loaf painting there is a graduated, progressive unfolding of space compressed into a long deep view from the narrow entrance flanked by the stones in the foreground. The nearness of the man-made wall counteracts any terror of the sublime and lays claim to a familiar land. The sense of abstraction and modernism to be found in the closely modulated tones is balanced by the closeness and definition of the foreground. The canvas is stampedWindsor and Newton’s “Prepared Canvas. British. London England. Single Primed” dating the work to the 1930s. Henry exhibited regularly in Magee’s Gallery from 1917 up till 1935. The single primed pure flax canvas is described as “a good canvas with a slight tooth suitable for small detail work.” 3 Dr Mary Cosgrove, November 2025 Footnotes: 1 Another painting of Sugar Loaf mountain and 5 other paintings by Henry were reproduced in Saorstát Éireann: Irish Free State Official Handbook, Dublin Talbot Press 1932 ed. Bulmer Hobson. See S. B. Kennedy 2007, p. 245. 2 See S.B. Kennedy 2007, p. 128. 3 npg.org.uk. British canvas, stretcher and panel suppliers’marks: Part 10, Windsor & Newton canvas, p. 24. €100,000-€150,000 (£87,720-£131,580 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot26