Howard Helmick (1845-1907) ''The Bibliophile'' Oil on canvas, 83 x 67cm (32½ x 26¼'') Signed and dated 1871 ''This work is untitled but might possibly be a work called ''Studying His Almanac'' ...

Howard Helmick (1845-1907) ''The Bibliophile'' Oil on canvas, 83 x 67cm (32½ x 26¼'') Signed and dated 1871 ''This work is untitled but might possibly be a work called ''Studying His Almanac'' Brought up on a farm in Ohio, Howard Eaton Helmick began his art training in the Ohio Mechanics Institute in Cincinnati, and subsequently at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (from 1862-64). Perhaps he emigrated to avoid becoming a soldier, but two years later he was successfully established in Paris, studying under the guidance of Alexandre Cabanel at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His teacher was accomplished and award winning, and it's easy to see the stylistic influence on this talented pupil, who then showed work at the Paris Salon. Although his initial titles are in French, he soon began exhibiting titles at London's Royal Academy that suggest Irish subjects. Becoming friends with other exiles such as Whistler, he worked from a capacious studio in London's Holland Park, as well as showing titles from addresses in Ireland. He swiftly made a name for himself as an accomplished subject and genre painter, and his many surviving paintings and etchings demonstrate his consistent and undoubted talent. This composition brings to mind accounts by a writer friend of Helmick's, who visited him where he escaped London to paint at lodgings in Kinsale. Hawthorn describes how secretive the artist was about the place that he found so inspiring, just two hours ' by jaunting car' from Cork City in the south west of Ireland. 'Helmick, in his roamings in quest of genre, had discovered it, and every winter afterwards had set up his easel there. The winter climate is deliciously mild, so that you may sit at your open window in your shirt sleeves (as Helmick did to paint and I to write), yet a snow light will fall playfully for a few minutes, to melt as quickly?There is a liquid depth in the atmosphere, mystical and enchanting?Nor are there any other girls so good to be painted,?nor ''interiors'' more suitable to contain them. Then take the genius of Helmick, and the spell is wrought.' This scene appears unmistakably to be one of his Irish ones. The serving girl wears typical rural Irish attire, with her apron tucked up around her waist in the fashion that was customary for working women, with her white bawneen shawl and her head uncovered showing that she's unmarried. Her pose is reminiscent of other girls painted by Helmick, such as one in 'The Unexpected Visit', which similarly contrasts youth with old age. This scene could be set in the eighteenth century house that Hawthorn describes where the two men lodged 'a hotel, a recent erection, hardly a century old, and adequately equipped, and administered by a landlady and her two daughters?sixteen and seventeen, one slender small and graceful, with thoughtful blue eyes and crowned with silken hair?they would pose for the artist and prattle with the storyteller?'. Although lacking a title on a label, this does seems to be an early Irish work, predating the characteristically Irish titles he exhibited annually at the Royal Academy. The masses of enormous books scattered around the room, the spider legged table and Queen Anne chair, link this with the furnishings in his studies of Irish priests in their well-appointed rooms.'' Claudia Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006), fig. 59. Claudia Kinmonth 'Howard Eaton Helmick Revisited: Matrimony & Material Culture through Irish Art' in V. Krielkamp ed', Rural Ireland the Inside Story (Exhibition Catalogue, McMillan Art Gallery Boston College, 2012), pp. 89-101. Claudia Kinmonth, September 2013

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