FROM THE ARCHIVES:Artist and critic Arthur Power considered the work of his friend Paul Henry in this assessment. – Joe Joyce
When one looks at a Paul Henry painting, one must remember that many of them were painted just as the new independent Ireland was coming into being.
Indeed, he told me that when he was living in his studio in Merrion Row he was awakened one night by the Black and Tans bursting into the Co-operative stores underneath and turning everything upside down, including the great barrels, in their search for arms.
Born and brought up the son of an eccentric parson in Belfast, an uncle giving him some money, he made his way to Paris as a young man. There, in the studios, the name of Cezanne was just being bruited. The influence of the impressionists was beginning to fade and the new philosophy in painting was construction par les valeurs – a reaction to the formless mistiness of the impressionists.
Henry naturally imbibed this new approach, and returning to London he tried to get a living with his drawings of well-known personalities for the newspapers. Then, going on a holiday to Achill, he decided, come what might, to remain there. As he said himself: “I threw away my return ticket” – and then he set himself to paint the peasants in that splendid setting of mountain, sea, lake and bog, applying the theories he had learned in Paris.
At that time the political philosophy in Ireland could be summed up in the phrase: “Return to our Sources” – that was, to our Celtic origins. And the people, it was thought, who had been least contaminated by the English influence were the peasants in the remote west. Hence, the paintings of Henry, Keating, Lamb, MacGonigal, of the whole Irish school at that time, North and South.
But today we have regained our nationality and do not hold the same view about the peasantry as WB Yeats, Paul Henry, Keating and others did – the peasants have changed anyway.
The internationalism of the Living Art (exhibition) has made artists and the public aware of the dominant currents in continental and American art; the present-day youth look at Henry’s work differently. One critical comment I have heard was: “He was too fond of the west and not fond enough of imaginative painting.”
From the contemporary and abstractionist point of view, there is a validity in this criticism. His painting is without the flights of the imagination which you get in an artist like Raoul Dufy. Nor again did it contain a prophecy of the threatening violence of modern life as expressed by Vlaminck’s lurid canvases.
Henry remained in his isolated romanticism, an isolation which did not tend to make him prophetic as so many continentals were – Max Ernst (sic), to mention another. The splendour of nature, and particularly as he saw it in the west: it and its peasants were his themes, seen with romantic intensity – and less and less of the peasant as time went on, and more of the mountain valley, lake and bog.
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