Bowman's Saturday radio programme of recent date stimulated you to re-read Paul Henry's autobiography An Irish Portrait, published nearly 50 years ago. There was the urge to get away from "the most narrow and arid religious atmosphere of his home in Belfast", the release to art school in Paris when a cousin provided the money. Bliss there, followed by hard slogging to sell his work in London. And then Robert Lynd and his wife urged him to go to Achill, and he did. And he stayed. He had met Yeats and Synge in Paris and when he later read Riders to the Sea, Synge, wrote Henry, "touched some chord which resounded as no other music ever had done." Achill, when he arrived, likewise "called to me as no other place had done."
He wrote of the village of Keel - no street, you wandered among the houses in any direction. He admired "the women in their colourful, barbarous clothes" and their life of labour, which aged them so quickly. He went around with a sketch-pad in his hand, noting faces especially. He had much to learn, he admitted. For on seeing him come, a woman called: "Come in, Come in, here comes the sketcher." "I had come up against one of the oldest superstitions of the world, the belief that something of the sitter entered into the drawing." On thinking it over, he wasn't sure it was superstition entirely. He thought it was partly "the natural shyness of extremely modest people."
He learned how important seaweed was for manuring the potatoes, and gave a vivid description of the way a harvest of seawrack, cast up onto the beach at Keel, was divided. A little man with a red beard which floated in the wind would mount a wall and blow a long note on a ram's horn; then the whole village came to life: "Every pony and ass with its creel was hurried to the spot; there was time given for everyone to assemble and the mass of weed was attacked with pitchforks and graipes and carried off to the village." Then the little man retired to his own dungheap and all was good humour, and not a protest at any unfair division. A place called Bunoun, four or five miles from Keel, was a regular source of much wrack too. The women walked there, would go up and down a cliff, fill their creels and empty them at the cliff top. All day, up and down. Later the kelp was taken to the village by ponies with creels.
A rich book, a lively book, and, needless to say, illustrated by his own magnificent pictures of the west - a dozen of them. His brother, Robert Mitchell Henry, became a professor at Queen's University, Belfast and wrote The Evolution of Sinn Fein.