Digging Potatoes, Achill Island, Co. Mayo

Paul Henry’s paintings of Achill Island, the largest of the Irish isles in County Mayo, are among the greatest evocations of the West of Ireland landscape. The artist hailed from Belfast and originally worked as a textile designer before moving to Paris in 1898 to study at the Académie Julian and the Académie Carmen, founded by James McNeill Whistler. On visiting Achill Island in 1910, he was overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape and fascinated by the rural community that he found there and remained for a decade to painstakingly create works that perfectly captured the way of life of that he witnessed around him. He explained that ‘Achill spoke to me, it called me as no other place had ever done ... I wanted to live there ... to see it every day in all its moods; in wind and rain, in storm, in summer and in winter, and by painting it in all these conditions to find out, if I could, the driving force behind its attractiveness’ (the artist, Paul Henry An Irish Portrait, London, 1951, pp. 50-51).

The present work, painted in the artist’s mid Achill period, and showing the influence of the French Barbizon painters, Jean-François Millet and Honoré Daumier, is an uncompromising view of a labourer stooped over and toiling in the heavy ground of an extensive peat bog. Henry divides the picture plane into two parts, the narrative element in the lower section in which the potato farmer can be barely distinguished from the sombre palette of the dark sod. The upper section celebrates the brilliance of the sky, elaborate cloud formation, and horizon with the use of bright blues and creamy whites. As the reviewer of Henry’s exhibition of recent paintings at John Magee Gallery in Belfast in 1917 remarked, ‘Henry succeeds in making the scene intensely realistic and he achieves this not by dramatic effect but rigidly adhering to the truth’ (Belfast News-Letter, 15 March 1917).