PAUL HENRY RHA RUA (1876-1958) Wind Blown Trees Oil on canvas, 43 x 48cms (17 x 19'') Signed Exhibited: Paul Henry: An Irish Portrait, Ulster Museum, November 1997-April 1998 (no numbers); Paul...

PAUL HENRY RHA RUA (1876-1958) Wind Blown Trees Oil on canvas, 43 x 48cms (17 x 19'') Signed Exhibited: Paul Henry: An Irish Portrait, Ulster Museum, November 1997-April 1998 (no numbers); Paul Henry, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, February-May 2003 (59, reproduced in colour); The Moderns, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, October 2010-March 2011 (12); A Celebration of Irish Art and Modernism, The AVA Gallery, Clandeboye, Co. Down, June-September 2011 (17, reproduced in colour) Literature: S. B. Kennedy: Paul Henry, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2000, p. 120, reproduced; Paul Henry: with a Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2007, p. 203, catalogue number 507, reproduced in colour. ''The Moderns'' IMMA 2011 Illustrated P 46 Judged stylistically this picture must date from around 1918-19, which the use of a coarsely woven canvas also suggests. The setting is almost certainly Achill Island, where Henry was living at the time, and if so the background mountain, with its distinctive conical shape, must be Slievemore, which dominated the topography of the Island. Kennedy 2007 (p. 203) suggests that the setting may be the Mourne Mountains in County Down, but that now seems improbable. The handling of the leafless trees, illustrating their fine architectural structure, is similar to that in The Fairy Thorn, 1917 (Kennedy, 2007, number 468), and other Henry compositions of the period and adds to the symbolic feeling for the landscape characterized in the composition. Despite the harshness of this winter scene, there is a fluidity in the application of the paint, and the delicate use of colours-warm pinks and light greens especially-notable on the trunk of the foreground tree and the rocks that surround it, is a device we see in later Henry pictures, such as the splendid Connemara Village, of 1933-4, which is now in the National Gallery of Ireland collection. The precision, even economy, of the brushwork throughout is another characterisitc of Henry's work in general and is something he learnt from his early teacher, Whistler. Dr. S.B. Kennedy

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