Irish Arts Review

AUCTION PREVIEW: Mealy's 19 JulySource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 28, No. 2 (SUMMER (JUNE - AUGUST 2011)), p. 52Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41202712 .

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6 PAUL HENRY RHA, RUA 1876- 1 958 ACHILL, VILLAGE BY THE LAKE oil on canvas on board 27.5x37.5cm

7 THE ARAN ISLANDS by J M Synge

8 Lady Gregory's bookplate

AUCTIONS

UNDER THE HAMMER

FAMILIAR APPEAL OF PAUL HENRY AT SOTHEBY'S For many Irish people, Paul Henry's oil

paintings have come to define the vision of

the West of Ireland even if such imagery bears little relation to 21st-century reality.

Accompanied by his wife Grace, Henry paid a first visit to Achill Island, Co Mayo in 1910

and was so overwhelmed by the experience that he made this remote north-western

corner of the country his principal home for

the next nine years. While much of the work

he produced during the period focused on

the hard-working residents of the area, dis-

playing indebtedness to the 19th-century French artist Jean-Francois Millet, from the

start he also painted the ШЩ landscape of Achill. In these, ^^^^^H many of the elements that ^^^^^H would become familiar over ^^^^^B the next four decades ^H^^l already manifested them- selves: the foreground devoted to an

expanse of flat ground on which nestle one or more thatched and white-washed cot-

tages; the blue tinted mountains rising behind; the upper portion of the canvas devoted to a sky across which move banks

6

of cloud. While there is evidence of habita-

tion and of the land being worked, the prin-

cipal impression is one of near-emptiness, of a place in which man has made relatively little impact and nature still reigns. It is a

seductive proposition, even if open to ques-

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN AND, ONE SUSPECTS, WILL ALWAYS BE A MARKET FOR THE ROMANTICIZED AND INCREASINGLY NOSTALGIC REPRESENTATION OF IRELAND THAT HENRY OFFERED

tion at the time Henry was first painting these pictures; no wonder therefore that the

Irish Tourist Board soon began reproducing his work as a means of selling the country to overseas visitors. His involuntary role in

creating the myth of the western counties as

an unspoilt Eden has yet to be thoroughly examined, but as S В Kennedy noted in his

2007 monograph on the artist, 'In the popu- lar mind such scenes - even yet - epitomize the West of Ireland as Cezanne's treatment

of Mont Sa inte -Victo i re epitomizes the south

of France or Constable's Suffolk the English

countryside.' The endurance of that appeal can be seen by Henry's consistently solid

performance at auction: there has always been and, one suspects, will always be a

market for the romanticized and increas-

ingly nostalgic representation of Ireland that

he offered. Hence there was no fear that one

of his West of Ireland village landscapes included in Sotheby's Irish sale last March

would fail to find a buyer. Tellingly it can only be dated as being produced at some point between 1928 and 1935. Already by the mid

1920s Henry had begun to cannibalize him-

self, reworking the same themes over and

over again. But it is precisely that familiarity of subject matter and approach that ensures

his popularity. Achill, Village by the Lake

(Fig 6) surpassed its upper estimate of

£50,000 to sell for £58,850. ■

Robert O'Byrne is the author of Dictionary of Living Irish Artists №Ж

over-used phrase 'end of an era' was for once applicable in 1991 when

. „7 y „„ Fred Hanna closed his family bookshop on Dublin's Nassau Street where

9га% j^'y^T* ■* nad been in business for around a century and where Joyce and Behan had

been known to browse the shelves. Hanna will be parting with his own out- « *

standing book collection through Mealy's when that auction house holds its

next rare books sale in July. Among the especially choice items is a copy of J

M Synge's The Aran Islands, published in 1907, the same year that saw the

first, infamous production of The Playboy of the Western World. The book ^?™1£^Г records Synge's summer visits to the islands over five years from 1 898 when

*~~~ he was gathering folklore and anecdotes later used for his dramas, and 7 improving his familiarity with the Irish language: photographs that he took of

the ¡slanders during this period were seen earlier this year in 'The Moderns' exhibition at the Irish

Museum of Modern Art. For Synge and other members of the Gaelic Revival, this part of the country

represented a kind of spiritual home, a place which had retained its ancient language and traditions.

Indeed, it can be said that Synge was one of those who created the myth of the West of Ireland which

persists to the present day. The Aran Islands, which Synge judged to be 'my first serious piece of work',

helped to establish that myth, thanks both to the writer's text and to the accompanying illustrations by

Jack В Yeats. While copies of the book can be found, that

in the possession of Fred Hanna is notable because it is |нв5Н^в^^иннвнввиввивя signed by both Synge and Yeats, and also contains the ^^ МЯ&аВ£к bookplate of Lady Gregory, having come from her own Ý» ^ЗКруЙЗк«^ library at Coole Park in Co Galway. Lady Gregory, of Я&^ЩшРшЕШ course, was one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre, ^^Л^Г!Г*Ч^^£~ч together with W В Yeats and Synge, whose In the Shadow ^«шНИ^ of the Glen was staged on the theatre's second night in -^Уг^ИитЯИИпУ business (the first night saw short plays by Yeats and

уЭшЗИеЯНи?^ Gregory). This copy of The Aran Islands is therefore rather аРкЯБяНБи^Внг special and carries a рте-sale estimate of Сб.ООО-СТрООО. <*'S^c»*ï*^^^^ and is now being offered for sale in the expectation that it *k£q^ ^* eSOr^>^ will fetch €6,0u0-€9,000. ™™в™™шшввв™

8

52 IRISH ARTS REVIEW I SUMMER 2011

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