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Charles Henry Cook (c.1830-c.1906) The Traveller at Restsigned lower left C.H. Cook
oil on canvas
61 x 41cm (24 x 16in)
Provenance:
Private Collection
€2,000-3,000 (£1,562-2,343)
Within the field of Irish genre painting, such comparatively large portraits of working people are unusual.
However, the majority of the surviving work of this artist to have come to light in the past few years,
demonstrates this artist’s particular interest in such rural figures. The work of Charles Henry Cook has
only relatively recently begun to be properly appreciated, as his work has been rediscovered, restored and
displayed. He was born in the west Cork town of Bandon and seems often to have worked around county
Cork, before he moved to England and sent a picture to the Dublin’s Royal HibernianAcademy from Bath.
This slightly rounded style of figure painting is characteristic of his other surviving social realist work. In
common with other genre painters portraying Irish life during the second half of the nineteenth century
(for example James Brenan & subsequently Howard Helmick), authenticity of detail was often combined
with a narrative message.
The seated man here is clearly from a rural background, he is well fed and clothed in what would have
been considered a fashionable style for his class. The corduroy knee breeches buttoned loosely below the
knee and his double breasted cut-away coat, although slightly ragged, yet clearly repaired and patched,
were respectable, as was his upturned collar and red cravat. Many rural people were poorly dressed in the
nineteenth century. Although those that could wore clothes they made themselves (‘home-spuns’ and hand
knitted stockings such as shown here) there was a huge trade in second hand clothes. A story by William
Carleton from the 1830’s shows how working people lacked clothes. He describes how each week patches
were sewn on to protect the sleeves from wear, and then removed temporarily the night before Mass. For
many, shoes were a luxury, reserved for men working on the land or with stock, but whose womenfolk
and children went barefoot. Here, Cook’s subject gazes directly at the viewer, with a benevolent look.
He seems to be waiting by the roadside as he smokes his clay pipe and takes his ease on a journey, as
suggested by his stick which might be used to carry his bundle of possessions tied up on the ground with
red cloth. The use of red to highlight areas of the composition, as well as the whole style with the sitter
portraying warmth and charm, are typical of Cook’s several other paintings of rural people.
According to Strickland’s Dictionary (of 1913) Cook also painted landscapes and he wrote that The Free-
man’s Journal ‘expressed the opinion that he had great power and gave promise of a future’. Having lived
in Sundays Well Avenue in Cork, with his widowed mother, he eventually moved to work in England by
the 1870’s. However this is unmistakably one of his Irish subjects. The background to this roadside scene,
with its suggestion of the sea and a peninsula and misty hillsides behind, seem likely to be coastal West
Cork, where many of his other Irish scenes were set.
This painting compares strongly stylistically to some of Cook’s others, in that it focuses on Irish rural life,
like several that have sold through this gallery, for example a milkmaid, ‘Little Peggy’ (exhibited R.H.A.
1864), ‘The Pig Market’ and most recently this year ‘Farmer’s Portrait’. His best known and most accom-
plished yet to have come to light, shows thirteen people in a pub interior ‘St Patrick’s Day’ (1867), and
hangs in the collection of The National Library in Dublin. The latter was included in two major exhibitions
of genre paintings, ‘Whipping the Herring’ (Crawford Gallery, Cork, 2006) and ‘Rural Ireland the Inside
Story’ (Boston, 2012). Others titles that Cook exhibited during his lifetime in Dublin and Cork included
for example ‘The Invited Models’ and ‘High Life Below Stairs’, and have yet to be traced.
Dr Claudia Kinmonth MA(RCA) is author of Irish Country Furniture 1700-1950 (Yale University Press,
1993) & Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006).
Claudia Kinmonth, March 2016