Lot 15 Paul Henry

Paul Henry RHA RUA 1876-1958 THE WIND BLOWN TREE, KILLARY HARBOUR Oil on canvas 16'' x 19 1/2'' (40.5cm x 49.5cm), signed. Provenance: Adams, Dublin, 2 July 1987, lot 84, where acquired by the present owner; Private Collection, Wicklow. Literature: S. B. Kennedy, Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 226, catalogue number 629 (as A Western Landscape with a Tree), reproduced This is a view of Killary Harbour where Henry worked a good deal in the years before he settled in Dublin. Thereafter he continued to make compositions from sketches done earlier, and it was in this manner that The Wind Blown Tree came about. The muted tones in the foreground and in the background mountains, which must be the Mweelrea Mountains, betray the influence of his one-time teacher in Paris, James McNeill Whistler. Henry made a number of compositions of wind blown trees, in which his attention is directed at the stark architecture of the trees. The brushwork also echoes Whistler, whose advice to his students was to work things out in one's mind and then set it down deliberately and concisely. Here, with little or no overpainting, we see this good advice in practice and the foreground grass, rocks and tree have been painted with great economy of means, as has the water beyond and the mountains too, which are rendered with little detail, save for the direction of the muted light. Dated 1925-9 on stylistic grounds. S. B. Kennedy October 2013.