Adam's Important Irish Art 5th December 2018

62 53 PAUL HENRY RHA (1877-1958) The Stick-Gatherer (1904) Charcoal on paper, 47 x 23cm (18½ x 9’’) Signed and dated 1904 Literature: Kennedy, S.B., Paul Henry, Yale 2000, p.33; Kennedy, S.B., Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations , New Haven & London, Yale 2007, CR No. 49 illustrated p.108. and noted ‘Whereabouts of original unknown’. € 8,000 - 12,000 Drawn in 1904 when Henry was living and working in London. He described his time there as ‘the second great adventure’ of his life and could be best described as a hiatus period between his student days in Paris and becoming a full-time painter. This period is notable for a large output of illustrative works done for various publications. His personal life too was blossoming and on September 17th, 1903 he married Emily Grace Mitchell. Many of his friends and acquaintances from his time in Paris had returned to London and had developed their careers in the newspaper and publishing businesses and it was through Ladbroke Black and Frank Rutter that Henry got the opportunity to provide illustrations for To-Day , a weekly paper edited by the two men. SB Kennedy notes in reference to the present work: ‘In the autumn of 1904 he began a series of illustrations called ‘ Types ’. The Un- fortunate , a drawing of an elderly pauper reading a paper by the Thames embankment at dusk, appeared on 5 October 1904, and was followed by The Grandmother (2 November), The Stick - Gatherer (9 November), The Ballad Singer (16 November) and The Crank (23 November). All of these drawings show his debt to Whistler and, indeed, that he continued to admire Whistler is evident from his attendance at the latter’s funeral on 23 July 1903.’ We are grateful to Dr S.B.Kennedy whose writings formed the basis of this entry.