James Humbert Craig RHA (1878-1944) Summer In The Rosses Oil on canvas, 38 x 50cm (14.9 x 19.6'') Signed, also signed and inscribed with title verso Provenance: From a Private Dublin Collection ...

James Humbert Craig RHA (1878-1944) Summer In The Rosses Oil on canvas, 38 x 50cm (14.9 x 19.6'') Signed, also signed and inscribed with title verso Provenance: From a Private Dublin Collection Donegal is a wide sweeping county and its landscape has appealed to artists over the centuries because of the long vistas which it affords to painters and the physical nature of the farmed land offers interesting ways of entering the compositional planes of a painting. The Rosses is a very picturesque area of Donegal and here we have the painters sense of a frenchified landscape by using the old playing card system much used by his northern contemporary Paul Henry, where the black and white shapes to be found in early cubism are here adapted to a narrative pastoral form. The dark of the turf stacks and walls are set against the whites of the gabled house, and leading into it are the notes of the red seed pods of the dock leaves picked out here and there throughout the landscape to give an underlying triangulation of composition and by having the women driving the cattle towards the centre of the painting, with the massed diagonals of the clouds, keeps the eye of the viewer focussed on the centre of the composition. The hayricks and the angular structure of the house and the attached outhouses reinforce the centrality of the composition whilst canting it just sufficiently off centre to stop the eye from rushing away to the horizon. The reds as notes are repeated from the dock leaves, through the cattle and on to a tiny brilliant note of the red cart and picked up here and there in the uplands of the landscape. Charm is present in abundance but so too is real pictorial skill the kind of work at which this Northern painter excelled and for which he is most valued and this work is possibly one of his very popular works exhibited in 1933, Sunlit Valley ~ The Rosses, Co. Donegal or very close to it in style and of the same date. Ciar?n MacGonigal, December 2008

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