Lot 38 Paul Henry

Paul Henry RHA 1876-1958 SPRING IN WICKLOW Oil on canvas, 12'' x 10'' (30.5 x 25.4cm), signed. Provenance: Mervyn Solomon, Esq., Belfast; sale, Sloans & Kenyon, Chevy Chase, Maryland, USA, 11 November 2007, lot 1865 (reproduced in colour in catalogue) Exhibited: (?) Fine Art Society, London, Four Irish Artists: J. H. Craig, Paul Henry, E. L. Lawrenson, J. Crampton Walker, March 1928 (catalogue number 92); the same artists, Fine Art Society, November 1930 (88); (?) 'In Connemara': Paintings by Paul Henry, Fine Art Society, April 1934 (38) Paul Henry was particularly adept at painting winter trees, where the interlacing of their branches often created a lively pattern against a light sky or, as in this case, the dark background of a hill or mountain. The easy bravura of his brushwork in Spring in Wicklow and the fluidity of the paint itself combine to suggest a date of execution of the early 1920s, that is, shortly after he settled in Dublin after almost a decade living and working on Achill Island. His move to Dublin had largely been at the behest of Grace, his first wife, but the city, and notably nearby County Wicklow, where he eventually settled, provided him with different subject matter to Achill and the richer Wicklow farmland led literally to a richer, more oil-laden use of paint. Henry painted two other pictures, each entitled Spring in Wicklow (see S. B. Kennedy, Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, New Haven and London, Yale Univeristy Press, 2007, numbers 590 and 659), dated 1922-3 and c.1926-8 respectively, and in both of these-and especially the latter-the composition is in a large measure dominated by winter trees set against the sky. As is noted above, Henry also exhibited pictures of this title at the Fine Art Society, London, in 1928, 1930 and 1934, and although one cannot be certain of the identity of the picture in each case, that there is a label of the Fine Art Society on the reverse of this work, suggests that it was shown on at least one of those occasions. This picture is numbered 1219 in S. B. Kennedy's ongoing cataloguing of Henry's oeuvre.