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

Mr and Mrs Marcus Beebe and thence by descent to the present owners

S. B. Kennedy, Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, 2007, no 600, illus. p.222

STRUCTURE Original canvas. There are a few tiny, isolated fly spots in the sky which should be removable with a light clean, otherwise the work appears in good overall condition. ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT Under UV light there appear to be no signs of retouching. FRAME Held in a wooden frame.
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Among the Twelve Pins, Connemara, with its subtly modelled areas of light and juxtaposition of masses of colour, is a masterful landscape painted at the height of Henry's career. The subject of this painting is the Twelve Pins, commonly referred to as the Twelve Bens, a range of mountains in County Galway. The eastern ridges overlook Lough Inagh, which is almost certainly the lake depicted in this picture.

Although originally from Belfast, Henry was deeply moved and inspired by the landscape of west Ireland and specifically of Connemara, and his landscapes of the region have rightfully earned him the status as one of the most influential Irish landscape painters of the 20^th century. Echoing the struggle to define a new Irish culture in the years after independence, Henry strived to forge a sense of Irish identity through his paintings of the country's western landscapes, the area that Henry saw as the "real soul of Ireland" (Paul Henry, in S.B. Kennedy, Paul Henry, 2003, p.27). Just as Henry saw Ireland as a country defined by both tradition and progress, his approach to landscape at once recalls the realistic landscapes of the nineteenth-century French painter Jean-François Millet and the spontaneous yet controlled brushwork of the Post-Impressionists. Henry was less interested in painting the exact physical appearance of the Irish landscape than in capturing the feeling that it exuded; he often painted his landscapes in his studio from sketches he had made sometimes years previously.

The harmonious palette and dark tone of the painting is characteristic of the artist's paintings from the mid and late 1920s. This was a particularly difficult time in Henry's personal life with the slow dissolution of his twenty-six year marriage to the painter Grace Henry, but it was also a period in which he produced some of his most powerful paintings. The composition of the landscape is divided into three planes with the man rowing the boat in the foreground, the village in the middle ground, and the Twelve Pins in the background, but Henry has united them through a harmony of blue colours and tones so that each element seems to belong entirely to the others. This painting presents an intriguing example of Henry's work from this period, as by the mid-1920s he typically did not include people in his landscapes. The rower's rare appearance here, however, fully captures Henry's ability to portray the deep connection between the people and the land of west Ireland.

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