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22
Paul Henry RHA RUA (1876-1958)
!atched Cottages with Lake and Mountains Beyond (1933-5)
Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24”)
Signed:
Provenance: Sale: Sotheby’s, London, 1 May 1991, lot 55, as Cottages in
Connemara;
de Veres, Dublin: 25 May 1993, lot 69, as West of Ireland
Landscape with Cottage and Lake, repr. in colour. 16 April 2002, lot
125, repr. in colour, acquired by the Oriel Gallery.
Literature: S. B. Kennedy,
Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the
Paintings, Drawings,
Illustrations, New Haven and London, Yale
University Press, 2007, catalogue number 757, p. 251.
Possibly a scene in Co. Kerry, an area that Henry &rst visited in late 1932 or
early 1933 when he stayed at Glenbeigh. !e visit was a watershed in his life,
for throughout much of the previous decade his relationship with Grace, his
&rst wife, had deteriorated and culminated with the break up of their marriage
in 1929. However, only by the spring of 1934 were the legalities of the situation
resolved.!us, when he again visited Kerry in September of that year, accompanied
by Mabel Young who later became his second wife, did his mood lighten as did
his palette in terms of tone and colour. !e freshness of this landscape, with the
light blues of the sky and the absence of angst, which characterizes so many of his
earlier paintings, re%ects the artist’s more buoyant mood. Henry was enchanted
with the Kerry landscape. ‘It is lovely. Wherever one turns there is material for
dozens of pictures’, he wrote to a friend in New York (Henry to James Healy, letter
of 13 December 1934, James Healy Papers, Healy Collection of Modern Irish
Literature, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford
University Libraries). He continued, saying ‘I felt that if I spent a lifetime … I
would never exhaust all the possible subjects’. Besides the area around Glenbeigh,
he explored the peninsula as far westwards as Waterville. Many of the resultant
pictures were included in his exhibition,
Recent Paintings of Kerry and Connemara
,
at the Combridge Gallery, Dublin, in May 1935.!e show was well received by the
newspapers, the Irish Press (7 May 1935) perceptively noting the ‘paler key’ of the
pictures, as is well exempli&ed in this picture.
Dr S.B. Kennedy, May 2013
!&'#,### - &)#,###
