14 by 16in. (35.6 by 40.6cm)

Title: A MOUNTAIN STREAM, CARNA, CONNEMARA, c.1934-37
Frame size: 19.5 by 21.5in. (49.5 by 54.6cm)
Note: By 1937 Paul Henry was painting the Irish landscape with aplomb having been working as an artist in Ireland for 27 years. A Mountain Stream Carna is an accomplished work most probably finished and polished in the studio from a smaller painted sketch done en plein air in western Connemara, an area full of lakes and mountain streams. The wildness and disorderliness of the place is tamed by the artist with formal geometrical underpinning that divides the canvas into thirds horizontally and vertically with diagonals through the middle. The sky takes up almost half of the scene and the foreground stream is as wide as the length of the sky. The widest part of the stream takes up two thirds of the width of the canvas. All is calmly secured in paint, yet the clouds roll across the sky and the stream races towards us. The wind can be felt and the stream can be heard especially by the emigrants who knew these places well. This small painting is a portal into a sad nostalgia of depression, recession and defeat in post-Treaty Ireland, reminding many of the beauty of one’s hard fought-over homeland. The lack of people in this painting is an indication of the high rate of emigration from the Carna area after the Famine. The imagined synesthetic sound of the water echoes in a desolate silence, the turf stacks being the only sign of human presence. However, despite this harsh reality, Carna had retained its own romance of folklore, mythology and song in Gaelic, the first language of the majority of its residents. (1) This painting is an example of Henry at the peak of his career when he was exhibiting regularly in America and Ireland and by which time he had accumulated much knowledge of Connemara. He had developed his technique of using a restrained palette to paint in a confident and fluid manner what he truly observed. He uses yellow ochre for the base colour of everything except the sky and the stream. He then applies white with a touch of blue and black on the mountains, varying the amount of white and direction of brushstrokes for light and shade and topographical effects. He uses burnt umber for the nearer hills, the outline of the banks of the stream and the turf stacks. Umber and white is mixed to record where the light hits the hills and the stacks and for the underlying base of the stream. Horizontal strokes of pure white depict the ripples of water and sky reflections with some dashes of cool blue to reflect the mountains. Details of stones in the foreground and edges of the riverbank are drawn finely in burnt umber. Brighter shades of yellow are placed horizontally across the distant lowland and jiggled across the foreground to suggest bog cotton and wildflowers. White with a touch of black is mixed and used for the grey clouds with pure white and a darker grey used for lighter and darker shades. Henry experimented with foregrounds and skies in his earlier work but at this later stage, by the use of well-defined objects such as rocks in the foreground, he has partially solved the modernist problem of how to create a naturalistic depth without denying the flatness of the canvas. Dr Mary Cosgrove November 2023 Footnotes: 1. Sean O’Sullivan (1966), Folktales of Ireland, University of Chicago Press, pp xxxvi-xxxvii. 1

Excellent condition.

oil on canvas

signed lower left; titled on reverse; also with Cynthia O'Connor label on reverse