37
Important Irish Art
,
wednesday 4th December 2013 at 6pm
18
Paul Henry RHA RUA (1876-1958)
Old Woman - Achill (1910/11)
Oil on board, 16.5 x 9.5cm (6½ x 3¾”)
Provenance:
James Pollock Gallery label verso;
Private collection,
Northern Ireland
When Paul Henry first went to Achill Island, in the summer of 1910,
it was the people of the island who caught his attention, and his inter-
est in the landscape of Achill and the West dates mainly from around
1916 or so.The allure of the people recalled Daumier, whose paintings
of peasant workers in the French fields he knew from his student time
in Paris. In particular the harsh life of the elderly fascinated him. ‘I
have yet to see people who worked so hard for so little gain. It meant
incessant toil with the spade’, he later commented in his autobiogra-
phy (
Henry, An Irish Portrait
, 1951, p. 57). And the women, with their
usually homespun flannel clothes, especially ‘made a deep impression’
on him due to their perseverance in the face of great uncertainty. As
with a number of his early Achill pictures-
A Prayer for the Departed
,
Old People Watching a Dance
,
The Peddlar’s Cart
, all of 1910-11, for
example-there is here a sense of pathos in the facial expression of the
woman, which is rendered with great economy of means.
Dated 1910-11 on stylistic grounds.There is a label of James Pollock’s
Gallery, Belfast, on the reverse. Also titled on a label on the reverse.
Old Woman-Achill
is numbered 1267 in S. B. Kennedy’s ongoing cat-
aloguing of Paul Henry’s oeuvre.
Dr. S.B. Kennedy
€5,000 - 7,000
