78
51
Paul Henry RHA RUA (1876-1958)
A Connemara Village (1939)
Oil on board, 45.5 x 38cm (18 x 15”)
Signed
Provenance: From the Collection of George &Maura McClelland and lent by them to IMMA 1999-
2004; Private collection Dublin
Exhibited: Possibly Paul Henry,
New Paintings
, Combridge’s Gallery, Dublin, from 8 April, 1940
(number unknown);
The Collection of George and Maura McClelland at the Irish Museum of Modern Art
, Irish Mu
seum of Modern Art, Dublin, Sept 2000 - Jan 2001 (no numbers, as
Cottages and Turf
,
reproduced in colour in accompanying brochure); and
The Moderns
, IMMA, Oct 2010 - Feb 2011, Cat. No. 13
Literature: Sean O’Faolain,
An Irish Journey
, London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1940, reproduced
in colour facing p. 186 and on the front cover;
S. B. Kennedy
Paul Henry
, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2000, p.129;
Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations
, New Haven and Lon
don, Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 79, 297, cat. no. 997;
The Hunter Gatherer: The Collection of George and Maura McClelland at the Irish Museum of
Modern Art
, IMMA 2005, Fig. 124 illustrated p.127; and
The Moderns
, IMMA, illustrated p.46
In 1939 Paul Henry toured Ireland with the writer Sean O’Faolain, gathering material for O’Faolain’s
travel book
An Irish Journey
. Henry’s exhibition at the Combridge Gallery in April 1940 was arranged
as a sort of trailer for the publication of the book. ‘Ireland is a land of fields, and farmers, and small
towns, and it is these that have made it what it is. Paul Henry and I want to rediscover that simpler,
more racy Ireland of the people’, noted O’Faolain (p. 3). Later, O’Faolain tells us, Henry made for the
West, ‘into the vast, quiet boglands’, with which he is so widely associated, and it was there that he
produced this composition, although its precise location-one is tempted to think that the background
mountain might Slievemore on Achill-remains unknown. From his travels with O’Faolain, however,
Henry made some of his finest late pictures, including Kinsale,The Antrim Coast, New Ross and The
Mall, Westport.
€50,000 - 70,000
