Lot 12 Paul Henry

Paul Henry RHA, 1876-1958 COTTAGES IN THE WEST Oil on panel, 7 1/2'' x 10'' (19 x 25.5cm), signed This appears to be a later variation of a composition that Henry first made in 1923-4, namely Connemara, which in 1925 was reproduced and widely placed by the London Midland and Scottish Railway Company in travel bureaux throughout Great Britain and Ireland. The original picture (see S. B. Kennedy, Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 223, catalogue number 602, illustrated)-which was exhibited at the Fourteenth Venice Biennale in 1924-shows a broader view of the landscape, with the land to the left hand side falling steeply, but the massing of the clouds, the profile of the mountains, the cottages and the roadway remain much as before. The handling of the paint, however, is now looser than in the original composition and the impasto is heavier, the brush strokes too being more precise in application. Cottages in the West is numbered 1287 in S. B. Kennedy's ongoing cataloguing of Paul Henry's oeuvre. Dated c. 1940s on stylistic grounds. Dr. S B Kennedy, August 2014