Adams Important Irish Art 23rd March 2016 : You can Download a PDF Version from the Bottom Menu Down Arrow Icon

Oil on board, 12.5 x 15.5cm (5 x 6¼’’)

Provenance: Mrs R. C. Booth; private collection; Sale, Sotheby’s, Chester, November 1989.

Exhibited: “Paintings Of Irish Life: Mr & Mrs Paul Henry” Pollocks Gallery Belfast, March 1911 Cat. No. 1

“Paintings Frances Baker, Grace Henry, Paul Henry, Casimir Dunn Markiewicz and George Russell”

Leinster Hall, Dublin Oct 1911, Cat. No. 20. under title “Clouds”

“Paul Henry: Paintings And Charcoals” Waddington Gallery Feb/March 1952 Cat. No. 23, Lent by Mrs. Booth

“Paul Henry Retrospective Exhibition” Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin Belfast Museum and Art Gallery

Belfast, May - July 1957, Cat. No. 49 under title “Cumlus Clouds” Lent by Mrs RC Booth, one of two works lent

by her.

Literature: S. B. Kennedy, Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, Yale University Press,

New Haven & London, p. 155, catalogue number 301.

This picture typifies Paul Henry’s style when he first went to Achill Island in Co. Mayo in 1910. It is therefore one of his

very first Achill pictures. Typically for the time, he has used heavy impasto throughout and one can well see the cumu-

lous clouds which so often feature in his work. Even the immediate foreground has been briskly painted and there is

little or no detailing in the scene. Dugort is situated north-east of the village of Keel. It was to Dugort that Henry went on

his arrival in Achill, but even then he found that the place ‘swarmed with tourists’, and the next morning he took a jaunt-

ing car to Keel, which delighted him. ‘As I wandered round and through the village, and out on the road that led through

Pullough, and looked down on Dooagh and to the noble cliffs of Achill Head, I felt that here I must stay smoehow or

another. I would not go farther’, he wrote. (Paul Henry, An Irish Portrait, Batsford, London, 1951, p. 3). The mountain at

the right side of the painting is unnamed, but rises to a height of two hundred and fourteen metres. Slievemore, which

dominates the landscape of Achill, is immediately to the left.

There are two Sotheby’s labels on the reverse and a label of the Dawson Gallery, Dublin, as the framer.

Dr. S.B. Kennedy

€ 6,000 - 10,000