ADAM'S - Important Irish Art Auction - 31st May 2017 (Click Lot title for more images and to Place Bid)

Oil on panel, 26.5 x 39.2cm (10½ x 15½’’)

Signed

Old printed fragment from an exhibition list verso with title and No.26, 5.5 (five guineas)

Provenance: Hector Boyd Hanna (1886-1982), thence by descent.

A label on the back of the painting reads: ‘26. Gubellaunaun from the bog by Paul Henry’, which may be the number in an

exhibition catalogue, but it has not been traced.

Hector Hanna attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (Inst.) from 1900 to 1905. Paul Henry also attended Inst. for

two years, from September 1891. After graduating from Oxford in 1909 Hanna became assistant to Professor Robert Henry,

Paul’s brother, in the Department of Latin at Queen’s University in Belfast. He returned to Inst. as a master in 1916 and was

appointed Headmaster of the Classical Department in 1930. The Hanna family believe that their grandfather, Hector Hanna

got to know Paul Henry through Paul’s brother Robert and that having lent the young artist some money was offered in return

a small selection of paintings. They have remained in the Hanna family since then.

Gubellaunaun from the Bog

is similar to

A Bog by the Sea

Winter

c.1930, reproduced in S. B. Kennedy, Paul Henry: with a cat-

alogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2007, p. 213, catalogue number

549, but the latter picture is probably earlier in date. Also, the latter represents Gubellaunaun in the distance and it was on

Gubellaunaun that Henry thought of returning to London, but quickly dismissed the idea. ‘The currents of life had carried me

to this remote spot [Achill Island], and there seemed no current strong enough to carry me away….I made another of my quick

decisions, which I never regretted and taking my return ticket to London out of my pocket tore it into small pieces and scat-

tered the fragments into the sea which foamed round the rocks of Gubellaunaun’, Henry later wrote in his autobiography,

Irish Portrait

(1951). Henceforth he would be a landscapist and would work in Ireland.

Gubellaunaun from the Bog

is numbered

1317 in S. B. Kennedy’s on-going cataloguing of Paul Henry’s oeuvre.

Dr S.B.Kennedy, April 2017

€ 30,000 - 40,000