Mountains and Lake, Connemara

Considered by many to be the most recognizable Irish landscape artist of the twentieth century, Paul Henry began his artistic career as a textile designer, studying at the Government School of Design in Belfast. He travelled to Paris in 1898 to study at the Académie Julian and at Whistler’s Académie Carmen. Whilst in Paris he met Grace Henry (née Mitchell) whom he married in London in 1903. In London he received encouragement from Walter Sickert and made a living giving classes, writing pamphlets, and submitting illustrations to the daily papers. He returned to Ireland in 1910 and lived for nine years on Achill Island, where he learned to capture the peculiar interplay of light and landscape specific to the West of Ireland.

As S.B. Kennedy writes of the present work in his 2007 monograph Paul Henry: with a catalogue of Paintings Drawings and Illustrations, 'An unusually large canvas for Henry, painted at about the time of his visit with Mabel Young to County Kerry in 1934. Here the visual emphasis is placed on the group of cottages in the foreground, caught in light and delineated with the warm greens of a surrounding meadow; behind are several layers of undulating bogland rendered in browns, ochres and blues as they recede into the distance. Overall there is a sense of timelessness; there is no evidence of a human presence save for the cottages. The paint has been applied with great care and with little variation in the impasto and the sense of freshness and clean air, which pervades the whole composition, also typifies much of the artist’s work of the mid-and-late 1930s' (S.B. Kennedy, op. cit., 2007, p. 269).

This delightfully fresh picture shows Henry at the height of his powers in the early-mid 1930s, a time when his domestic circumstances - which always reflected directly on his work - had become settled after the turmoil from the breakdown of his marriage to Grace in the late 1920s, a period much dominated by the use of dark umbers and olive greens in his paintings. From the early thirties, however, until the end of his career his mood brightened with Mabel, and this is reflected in the brighter palette and a sense of lightness expressed in free, spontaneous brushwork that characterized his output. In the case of Mountains and Lake, Connemara, we see his use of the vast sky, clouds and mountains painted in bright blues and whites reflected in the still water to frame the cottages and peat stacks brightly in the centre ground. A closely related painting, A Connemara Village, was sold by Christie’s on 14 May 2004, lot 148 (£251,650) and is now in The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.