80
64
Paul Henry RHA RUA (1876-1958)
Waterville, Co.Kerry
Oil on canvas laid on board, 40.5 x 46cm (16 x 18”)
Signed
Provenance: Combridge Gallery, Dublin, 1946, by whom
lent for a time to the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin; thence
the artist’s studio; Mrs McAreavey, acquired from Mabel
Young in 1962; from the estate of the late James Gibson
Exhibited:
Paintings by Paul Henry, R.H.A
., Combridge’s
Gallery, Dublin, 23 October-6 November 1945 (catalogue
number 9, as Waterville);
Pictures by Paul Henry, RH
A,
Heal & Son, Tottenham Court Road, London, from 14
January 1946 (5);
Paintings and Charcoals: Paul Henry RHA
,
Waddington Galleries, South Anne Street, Dublin, 21
February- 3 March 1952 (21);
Paintings and Drawings by
Paul Henry
, !e Studio, Sidmonton Square, Bray, until 8
November 1956 (10);
Paul Henry: Retrospective Exhibition,
Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin,
and Belfast Museum & Art Gallery, Belfast, May-July
1957 (10);
Paul Henry: Paintings and Drawings
, Shannon
Airport, Limerick, August 1957 (10)
Literature: S. B. Kennedy: Paul Henry, 2000, p. 136;
Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings,
Illustrations, 2007,
pp. 82, 308, catalogue number 1063
(both the 2000 and 2007 books published in New Haven
and London by Yale University Press)
!is is probably the picture of this title that Paul Henry &rst
exhibited at the Combridge Gallery, Dublin, in October
1945. It was almost certainly painted in the summer of
that year when Henry and his second wife, Mabel Young,
stayed at the Great Southern Hotel in Waterville.!ey had
&rst visited the Iveragh Peninsula a decade earlier, in 1932,
staying on the northern side of the Peninsula at Glenbeigh.
Paul was enchanted by the area. ‘It is lovely. Wherever
one turns there is material for dozens of pictures … I felt
that if I spent a lifetime … I would never exhaust all the
possible subjects,’ he wrote to a friend, James Healy, in New
York (letter of 13 December 1934, Healy Papers, Stanford
University Libraries).!e Peninsula produced a paler key in
his paintings, as the Irish Times commented (7 May 1935),
which contrasts with the heavier, more brooding works of
the late 1920s and early 1930s when his marriage to his
&rst wife, Grace, was breaking up and at a time when he
had other domestic di(culties. By 1945, with a much more
settled lifestyle, Paul and Mabel returned to Kerry-there is
no record of their having been there since the 1930s-and,
staying at Waterville, they used that as a base to explore
much of the Peninsula. !e area around Waterville has
welcomed many celebrities over the years, the most notable,
perhaps, being Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin. !e
Iveragh Peninsula, of course, is traversed by the famous
Ring of Kerry tourist route.
!e stretch of water depicted in this composition is
probably Lough Currane, which lies immediately to
the east of Waterville, which is the town crowning the
hilltop in the middle distance. !e ‘paler key’ that typi&es
Henry’s work in these late years of his painting career-he
su)ered almost total blindness shortly after this picture
was painted-is well seen in this composition, where the
mounting cumulus clouds in the sky are re%ected in the
sea in the foreground, which is almost without detailing of
any sort, save for the masterly dexterity of the brushwork.
In this regard,
Waterville, Co, Kerry
may be compared with
one of Henry’s &nest late works,
Kinsale
, of 1939 (Kennedy,
2007, number 994).
For a discussion of Henry’s other Iveragh Peninsula pictures
see S. B. Kennedy,
Paul Henry’s Iveragh Paintings
, in John
Crowley & John Sheehan (eds.),
!e Iveragh Peninsula: A
Cultural Atlas of the Ring of Kerry, Cork
Cork University
Press, 2009, pp.441-4.
Dr. S.B. Kennedy, May 2013
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