60
40
Howard Helmick (1845-1907)
“The Bibliophile”
Oil on canvas, 83 x 67cm (32½ x 26¼”)
Signed and dated 1871
€3,000 - 5,000
Brought up on a farm in Ohio, Howard Eaton Helmick
began his art training in the Ohio Mechanics Institute in
Cincinnati, and subsequently at the Pennsylvania Academy
of Fine Arts (from 1862-64). Perhaps he emigrated to avoid
becoming a soldier, but two years later he was successfully
established in Paris, studying under the guidance of Alex-
andre Cabanel at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His teacher was
accomplished and award winning, and it’s easy to see the
stylistic influence on this talented pupil, who then showed
work at the Paris Salon. Although his initial titles are in
French, he soon began exhibiting titles at London’s Royal
Academy that suggest Irish subjects. Becoming friends
with other exiles such as Whistler, he worked from a capa-
cious studio in London’s Holland Park, as well as showing
titles from addresses in Ireland. He swiftly made a name for
himself as an accomplished subject and genre painter, and
his many surviving paintings and etchings demonstrate his
consistent and undoubted talent.
This composition brings to mind accounts by a writer friend
of Helmick’s, who visited him where he escaped London
to paint at lodgings in Kinsale. Hawthorn describes how
secretive the artist was about the place that he found so
inspiring, just two hours ‘ by jaunting car’ from Cork City
in the south west of Ireland. ‘Helmick, in his roamings in
quest of genre, had discovered it, and every winter after-
wards had set up his easel there. The winter climate is de-
liciously mild, so that you may sit at your open window in
your shirt sleeves (as Helmick did to paint and I to write),
yet a snow light will fall playfully for a few minutes, to
melt as quickly…There is a liquid depth in the atmosphere,
mystical and enchanting…Nor are there any other girls so
good to be painted,…nor “interiors” more suitable to con-
tain them. Then take the genius of Helmick, and the spell
is wrought.’
This scene appears unmistakably to be one of his Irish ones.
The serving girl wears typical rural Irish attire, with her apron
tucked up around her waist in the fashion that was custom-
ary for working women, with her white bawneen shawl and
her head uncovered showing that she’s unmarried. Her pose
is reminiscent of other girls painted by Helmick, such as one
in ‘The Unexpected Visit’, which similarly contrasts youth
with old age. This scene could be set in the eighteenth cen-
tury house that Hawthorn describes where the two men
lodged ‘a hotel, a recent erection, hardly a century old, and
adequately equipped, and administered by a landlady and her
two daughters…sixteen and seventeen, one slender small and
graceful, with thoughtful blue eyes and crowned with silken
hair…they would pose for the artist and prattle with the
storyteller…’. Although lacking a title on a label, this does
seems to be an early Irish work, predating the characteristi-
cally Irish titles he exhibited annually at the Royal Academy.
The masses of enormous books scattered around the room,
the spider legged table and Queen Anne chair, link this with
the furnishings in his studies of Irish priests in their well-
appointed rooms.”
Claudia Kinmonth, September 2013
This work is untitled but might possibly be a work called “
Studying His Almanac
”
