Lot 37 Paul Henry

Paul Henry RHA RUA 1876-1958 AN ACHILL WOMAN (c.1910) OIl on board, 15'' x 9'' (38 x 23cm), signed; Provenance: Label verso shows this painting was once in the collection of the artist Emer O'Rourke Dickey; Private Collection, Belfast. Exhibited: Paintings by Mrs. Frances Baker, Grace Henry, Paul Henry, Casimir Dunin-Markiewicz and George Russell (AE), Leinster Hall, Dublin, 16-21 October 1911, catalogue number 13 Literature: S. B. Kennedy: Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 162, catalogue number 337 (The Red-haired Woman). This may be The Red-haired Woman picture that Paul Henry exhibited in his 1911 Dublin exhibition. When Henry first visited Achill, in the summer of 1910, it was the people of the island, going about their everyday endeavours, who caught his attention. His interest in the landscape of the island and of Connemara in general dates mainly from later years. To Henry the intrigue of the people of Achill recalled Daumier, whose peasant workers-The Angelus comes instantly to mind-he knew from his student days. The elderly folk of Achill particularly fascinated him, as she noted years later in his autobiography, An Irish Portrait (London, Batsford, 1951). 'I have yet to see people who worked so hard for so little gain', he said. And the women, in their homespun flannel clothes, made a deep impression on him because of their perseverance in the face of adversity. In An Achill Woman, as in many of his early Achill pictures-Old People Watching a Dance or Old Age Pensioners, for example-there is a sense of pathos in the facial expression of the woman, which is set down with great economy of means. Dr. Brian Kennedy October 2013