Paul Henry, R.H.A., R.U.A.

The canvas board is sound and very slightly bowed. There are some areas of very fine craquelure, visible upon close inspection, mainly to the clouds, cottage fronts and water. There are two flecks of old paint loss to the right of the cottage near the right edge and a further fleck one inch above the signature. The surface is slightly dirty and may benefit from a light clean. Otherwise in good original condition. Ultraviolet light reveals pigments which fluoresce that are apparently the hand of the artist. Held in a painted simple wood frame. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 5575 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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'Here,...at the height of his powers, we have the quintessential 'Paul Henry' and with it an appreciation of the West that, once seen, is hard to forget. In the popular mind such scenes...epitomise the West of Ireland as Cezanne's treatment of Mount Sainte-Victoire epitomises the south of France or Constable's Suffolk the English landscape.' (S.B. Kennedy, Paul Henry: Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2007, p.64)

The rather loose handling of the paint in this picture suggests a date of execution of c. 1928-35. The composition is similar to a number of Henry's other works (see S. B. Kennedy, Paul Henry, with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, catalogue numbers 544, 613, 632, 677, 772, 933) which suggests that it was done in the studio from sketches made earlier. While the venue cannot be identified it must be a scene in Connemara, and possibly on Achill Island, where the artist lived from 1910 until 1919.

Numbered 1258 in S. B. Kennedy's ongoing cataloguing of Paul Henry's oeuvre.

We are grateful to S. B. Kennedy for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of this work.