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James Humbert Craig RHA RUA (1877 - 1944)
Coast Road, Bloody Foreland
Oil on board, 29 x 42cm (11½ x 16½”)
Signed
Exhibited: The Fine Art Society, London, May 1957
Born in Belfast, Craig spent his early years in Ballyholme, Co. Down, where he
was educated at a private school. Craig derived little satisfaction from working
in the family tea business but it enabled him to travel and paint, particularly in
Switzerland and the south of France. In time, he turned a more serious eye to
art as a profession, specifically to landscape painting. Apart from attending the
Belfast College of Art for less than a term, Craig was self-taught.
He was influenced in his early work by Paul Henry but as his career developed
this became less apparent. He first exhibited at the RHA in 1915 at the relatively
late age of thirty-seven when he showed a pair of coastal scenes near his home
at Ballywater.
In 1928 he was elected to both the RUA and the RHA and in that same year
his work featured (along with that of Lavery and Henry), in an exhibition of
Irish art at the Fine Art Society, London. Throughout the inter-war period he
continued to exhibit in Belfast and Dublin and also in London. In 1930 his
work was included in the prestigious Exhibition of Irish Art in Brussels in 1930.
Though he went on sketching tours of Connemara and Donegal Craig found so
much stimulus in the scenery of the Glens of Antrim that he acquired a cottage
at Cushendun and his work became closely identified with the Middle Glens
thereafter.
Craig had a significant following among younger artists and although he and his
followers ignored European Modernism, they were perfectly in tune with the
romantic attitudes prevalent in Ireland during the period. Craig, together with
Paul Henry, Frank McKelvey, Charles Lamb and Maurice MacGonigal, comes
closest to personifying a distinctive Irish School of Painting.
€5,000 - 7,000
