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

Oil on board, 35 x 40cm (14 x 15¾”)

Signed

Provenance: John A. Costello, Taoiseach 1948–1951 and 1954–1957, thence by descent.

Exhibited: Possibly as ‘In Connemara’:

Paintings by Paul Henry, R.H.A.

, Fine Art Society, New Bond Street, London, April, 1934 (20);

Recent Paintings by Paul Henry, R.H.A.

, Combridge’s Gallery, Dublin, November 1937 (18) where purchased.

This painting represents Paul Henry at the height of his powers. After the decade of the 1920s, when his personal life was troubled, by the

early 1930s when he was free of those troubles his palette brightened, his colours became crisper and the overall nature of his paintings grew

lighter.

All these things can be seen in

A Connemara Village

. Typically with Henry, the actual scene occupies around half of the composition, the upper

half being given to the sky, with its gentle, but developing, cumulus clouds, which are precisely modelled and which as yet don’t threaten rain.

In the lower half of the composition there is a distant mountain which arrests the eye’s recession; then a strip of narrow ground, here picked

out in dark greys and blues; then the middle distance which contains the narrative of the scene-the cottages with their turf stacks-while the

foreground is given over to the lake or tarn, with its reflections mirroring the stillness of the sky. Also in the foreground the artist has allowed

himself some freedom of brushwork in the briskly painted marshes of the immediate foreground.

All is calm in this landscape which, even in the mid-1930s, had remained unchanged for generations. Yet throughout, the brushwork retains the

clarity that Henry learned in Paris with Whistler at the fin de siècle, the clouds being crisply but clearly delineated, the cottages themselves set

down apparently with a minimum of effort, while the brushwork in the foreground is perfectly descriptive of the nature of the terrain. Priced at

£85.00 in Combridge’s Gallery in 1937

A Connemara Village

was one of the most expensive pictures in the exhibition and hence highly thought

of by Henry at that time.

A Connemara Village

is numbered 1301 in S. B. Kennedy’s ongoing cataloguing of Paul Henry’s oeuvre.

€ 70,000 - 100,000