James Humbert Craig RHA RUA (1878-1944) Fair Day, Cushendun, Co. Antrim Oil on board, 30 x 43cm (12 x 17'') Signed Literature: ''James Humbert Craig'' - The Peoples Artist, full page...

James Humbert Craig RHA RUA (1878-1944) Fair Day, Cushendun, Co. Antrim Oil on board, 30 x 43cm (12 x 17'') Signed Literature: ''James Humbert Craig'' - The Peoples Artist, full page illustration, p.109 Provenance: A Northern Island Collection. Belfast born and almost entirely self trained he must have ingested some skills not just those of observation from some of his Swiss mother's cousins some of whom were artists and noted church architects. He did attend but did not thrive in the Belfast School of Art so that his skills may be regarded as self taught but obviously coming from a well-to-do comfortable Belfast Merchant family with a sophisticated Swiss mother, other influences were at work, even if only in the background. Possessed of innate skills in ''plein air'' painting his was a great capacity to give the sense of scale for large landmasses like the Donegal paintings or his works of the Glens of Antrim.They all convey the sense of a peopled landscape, even if that landscape is an empty one, but empty by virtue of emigration or for similar reasons. The idea of the shaped or farmed landscape comes from the aesthetic of giving scale to the organisation of the houses, walls, the fields are made by and for man, so that the relationship of building and object to the wider landscape is very significant for the artist. His palette is generally light in tone with massed clouds which he uses like John Constable to give the measurement of nature to living creatures, man or beast. The scudding clouds, the houses, the gardens of potatoes in a Donegal farm, the small fields for ploughing, the rivers and loughs are all the portions of his creation to which he brings his art practice's capacity to render some memorable images of Ireland. He was happy to be a painter of the Irish landscape and skies and along with his lifelong interest in angling, it gives his sense of place its correct role in Irish Art history. Fair Day, Cushendun, was painted before Ronald McNeill 1st Lord Cushendun commissioned the architect Clough Williams-Ellis to redesign the village as if it were Cornwall crossed with a Swiss village. The view is towards the enclosed harbour which lay at the base of the long main street known as the Square, and the bridge spanning the river Dun. One of the villages of the 9 Glens of Antrim, its very picturesequeness made it an obvious place for artists to visit and record. Craig was very good at markets and knew and liked many of the people thus represented in these scenes. A great number of his finest works are of peopled streets with fair doings going on in the composition. The village itself is now much changed from those early days and has been owned by the National Trust since 1954 owing to its picturesque coastal setting in the heart of the Antrim coast and Glens together with its unique architectural inheritance resulted in its being designated as Conservation area in 1980. Ciar?n MacGonigal, December 2008

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