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!is is one of Paul Henry’s most accomplished works. Henry
went to Achill Island for the &rst time in August 1910.!rough
the in%uence of his friends Robert and Sylvia Lynd in London,
he had been introduced to the work of W. B. Yeats, whom he
had met in Paris in February 1899, and J. M. Synge, whose
tragic tone poem,
Riders to the Sea
, had made a deep impression
on him. Synge, he later wrote in his autobiography,
An Irish
Portrait
(London, 1951, p.48), ‘touched some chord which
resounded as no other music ever had done’ and, he tells us, it
was of
Riders to the Sea
that he was thinking as he left London
‘on the couple of weeks’ holiday’ he had promised himself. In
moving to Achill Henry had much to loose in London-the
Allied Artists’ Association, Sickert’s ‘at homes’ in his Fitzroy
Street studio, the Tour Ei)el in Charlotte Street, the Café
Royal, ‘all of them places with blessed memories’. Moreover,
he was beginning to make a reputation as a graphic artist on a
number of newspapers and journals. Nevertheless, he was drawn
to Achill Island-he was to spend nine years there-as a sort of
home-coming, for his maternal grandfather, the Rev. !omas
Berry, had preached the gospel on Achill in the mid-1830s.
Soon after his arrival on the island Henry made for the village
of Keel, on its southern shore. He was enthralled by the life he
found there. ‘Achill … called to me as no other place had ever
done’, he wrote (
An Irish Portrait,
p.50), yet, he said, although
‘the persuasiveness of its voice charmed me’, it was not easy to
follow its meaning. It was, however, an emotional call and he
decided to settle there,‘not as a visitor but to identify myself with
its life and to see it every day in all its moods.’ In particular the
peasantry working in the &elds reminded him of Millet, whose
work he knew as a student in Paris, and he had read Alfred
Sensier’s
Jean François Millet, Peasant and Painter
(London,
1881). Millet’s
!e Spaders
, which was reproduced in Sensier’s
book, deeply impressed on the young Henry as is evident in
!e Potato Diggers
.!e &elds in Achill were very small - ‘a man
might own a &eld or two beside his door and another bit of
land, about the size of a small suburban front garden, a mile or
so away’- having, for hereditary reasons, been sub-divided many
times over the years.
!e Potato Diggers
picture was painted at the old post o(ce in
Keel, which was run by John and Eliza Barrett, where Henry
lodged in 1910 and 1911. !e post o(ce was situated in the
centre of the village where the former Amethyst Hotel now
stands. Henry’s delight in his new-found circumstances is
palpable in his work done in these &rst months after his arrival
on the island and its ‘call’ is clear to be seen. In this picture
his Post-Impressionist background in Paris came back to him,
notably in the composition, with the diagonal direction of the
foreground rise where the &gures are digging and the opposing
diagonal of the background mountain, which is Slievemore.
!e upward thrust of the two &gures bent in toil unites these
diagonals with the sky and gives drama to the scene. Each
&gure, digging with a spade, is almost a direct quote from
Millet’s
!e Spaders
. Here, like Millet, Henry wanted to paint a
scene of life as it really was, the harshness of daily routine being
evident from the back-breaking work and the small return of
crops produced. ‘I have yet to see people who worked so hard
for so little gain’, he wrote years later. ‘It meant incessant toil
with the spade’, ploughs being useless on those stony &elds (
An
Irish Portrait
, p. 57). In pictures such as this, Henry introduced
a new realism to Irish art. Gone is the ‘stage Irishness’ of much
nineteenth century art and, as with Millet’s &eld workers, we
realize that life was di(cult, being neither heroic nor idyllic,
and the simple toil of the &gures gives a natural dignity to their
e)orts that is more convincing than much academic painting
of the time. In Irish terms, this new realism can be linked
back through George Moore to the French tradition of Zola,
Flaubert and the Goncourts. Like J. M. Synge’s prose based on
the life he found on the Aran Islands, Henry’s distillation of the
harsh life he found on Achill re%ects the natural rhythm of life
and nature.
Often Henry made more than one version of a composition,
and the exact pose of the &gures depicted in
!e Potato Diggers
was represented in another picture of the same title (Kennedy,
2007, p. 182, catalogue number 417) which dates from 1915-
16. In this second, smaller composition, the setting has been
expanded to show the sea in the background and the familiar
pro&le of the Cli)s of Menawn and Dooega Head, so that,
as here, it must be close to the road between the villages of
Keel and Dooagh. In both pictures, the man digging is Johnny
Toolis and the potatoes are being harvested from ridges, the
traditional method of cultivation on Achill (information from
John McNamara, conversation of 30 January 2003). !e same
two &gures appear in yet another Henry composition,
!e Potato
Harvest of 1915-17
(Kennedy, 2007, catalogue number 425).
Dr. S.B. Kennedy, May 2013
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