Paul Henry RHA (1876-1958) Cloudscape with Bird in a Thorn Tree (1908-09) Charcoal on paper, 48 x 34.5cm (19 x 13½) Signed Provenance: Dr Karl Mullen, Dublin; Oriel Gallery, Dublin; sold:...

Paul Henry RHA (1876-1958) Cloudscape with Bird in a Thorn Tree (1908-09) Charcoal on paper, 48 x 34.5cm (19 x 13½) Signed Provenance: Dr Karl Mullen, Dublin; Oriel Gallery, Dublin; sold: Adams, Dublin, 7 May 1981, lot 74, as Windswept Tree with Bird; Christie’s, Belfast, 31 May 1989, lot 421, reproduced, probably acquired by the present owner. Exhibited: Paul Henry 1876-1958, retrospective exhibition, Trinity College, Dublin, and Ulster Museum, Belfast, October 1973-January 1974, catalogue number 73, reproduced; Paul Henry, Oriel Gallery, Dublin, 21 March-8 April 1978; Paul Henry, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 19 February-18 May 2003 (ex-catalogue) Literature: Anne Crookshank and The Knight of Glin, The Watercolours of Ireland c. 1660-1914, London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1994, p. 278, reproduced; S. B. Kennedy, Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 129, catalogue number 154, reproduced Paul Henry first began to make drawings of subject matter such as this when he was living in Surrey around 1903-5. Shortly afterwards he started to exhibit these drawings at London’s prestigious Goupil Gallery and at the Allied Artists’ Association and quickly gained a reputation for his draughtsmanship. Reviewing Henry’s drawings at the Goupil Gallery in June 1906, for example, the influential critic Frank Rutter noted that these ‘romantic landscapes’, as he termed them, revealed an artist ‘who thoroughly understands his medium and uses it with rare discretion [to portray] poetic, almost idealized, aspects of nature to which [he said] the Celtic temperament is peculiarly sensitive’, and he concluded: ‘would it be fanciful to see the first signs of that new national school of painting now overdue in Dublin?’ (Frank Rutter, unidentified review, probably Sunday Times, June 1906 (TCD, MS 7434: 20a). And reviewing another of Henry’s charcoal drawings, Jimmy Good, a leader writer for Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal, wrote in 1918 that Henry’s work in the medium ‘comes as near perfection in this style as it is given to an artist to attain’. It was at the Allied Artists’ Association Exhibition in 1908, however, that Paul met Hugh Lane, whose Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin had opened a couple of months earlier. Lane too was impressed with Paul’s drawings and introduced him there and then to Dermod O’Brien, who had recently become President of the Royal Hibernian Academy. O’Brien invited Paul to submit work to the Academy’s annual exhibition, which he did in 1910. His connections with the Irish art world were thus beginning to strengthen. The drama seen here evolving in Cloudscape with a Bird in a Thorn Tree, the low horizon line, the emphasis placed on the empty expanse of bog land, which Henry encountered at Knaphill, Surrey, and which brought back memories of his childhood in Belfast, all echo his later landscapes done on Achill Island. The bird-a raven?-adds a sense of mystery and intrigue to the composition which is dated 1908-9 on stylistic grounds. Dr. S.B. Kennedy May 2015

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