Irish & International Art 25th April 2016 : Click Lot Title for More info & Pictures.

signed lower right

oil on board

36 x 41cm (14 x 16in)

Provenance:

Combridge’s Fine Art Gallery (label verso)

Estate of Dr. Marguerite Sykes Nichols

Private Collection

Literature:

S. B. Kennedy’s ongoing cataloguing of Paul Henry’s oeuvre, number 1288

€60,000-80,000 (£46,875-62,500)

From time to time Paul Henry painted reed filled lakes, but these are almost always situated

around Glenbeigh in County Kerry, where he first went in late 1932 or early 1933 (see S. B.

Kennedy, Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, Yale Uni-

versity Press, New Haven & London, 2007, Storm on a Connemara Lake, 1928-35, (number

706); West of Ireland Lake and Mountain Landscape, 1930-4 (753); Western Landscape, 1932-5

(801) and Landscape, Connemara, 1932-5 (806)).

The visit to Kerry marked a watershed in Henry’s life, for throughout the previous decade his

domestic affairs had deteriorated to culminate in the break up of his marriage to his first wife,

Grace. Thus, when he visited Co. Kerry his mood was lighter and this is reflected in his palette

both in terms of tone and colour. Henry was enchanted with Kerry, writing that the landscape

delighted him. ‘Wherever one turns there is material for dozens of pictures’, he told James

Healy, a friend in NewYork. He made a number of drawings for paintings, many of which were

later exhibited at Combridge’s Gallery, Dublin, in his exhibition of Recent Paintings of Kerry

and Connemara, when the Irish Press (7 May 1935) perceptively noted the ‘paler key’ in his

work, which mirrored his more settled mood. The artist’s new-found lightness of palette is well

reflected in A Kerry Lake.

This is one of Henry’s finest late paintings. It is almost certainly a scene in Co. Kerry, the sky

setting the mood for the whole scene. The composition is deceptively simple in concept and ex-

ecution: the cumulous clouds as yet are not ominous and the mountains, in typical Henry style,

halt the eye’s recession to draw attention to the middle-distance, with its softer terrain. The strip

of dark blue paint beneath helps to divide the middle-distance from the foreground, as do the

reflections in the water that melt into the reeds in the immediate foreground. Throughout, the

handling of paint reflects Henry’s student days in fin de siècle Paris and his teacher Whistler’s

advice to him-which he kept to all his life-to use paint economically, always deciding what he

wanted to do in advance rather than trying to work things out on the canvas. The closely modu-

lated tones of blue, notably in the sky, mountains and foreground lake, also recall Whistler’s

influence.

Dr. S.B. Kennedy, March 2016

Auctioneer’s Note:

Dr. Marguerite Sykes Nichols was a prominent oncologist living in New York City. At the time

of purchase in the 1960’s, she and her husband, industrialist Charles Nichols, had a house in

Ireland. They visited Ireland regularly for many years. She was also a big patron of the arts in

Vermont. She died at age 99 in 2012.