Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 12th November 2018

22 18 Paul Henry RHA RUA (1876-1958) Waterville, Co Kerry signed ‘PAUL HENRY’ lower right and titled on reverse oil on board 41 x 46cm (16 x 18in) Provenance: Combridge Gallery, Dublin, 1946, by whom lent for a time to the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin; Thence the artist’s studio; Mrs McAreavey, acquired from Mabel Young in 1962; The estate of the late James Gibson; Bell Gallery, Belfast (label verso); Private Collection Literature: S.B. Kennedy: Paul Henry Paintings, Drawings Illustrations, published by Yale, University press; Catalogue No.1063, page 308 €50,000-€70,000 (£44,642-£62,500) This is probably the picture of this title that Paul Henry first exhibited at the Combridge Gallery, Dublin, in Oc- tober 1945. It was almost certainly painted in the summer of that year when Henry and his second wife, Mabel Young, stayed at the Great Southern Hotel in Waterville. They had first visited the Iveragh Peninsula a decade earlier, in 1932, staying on the northern side of the Peninsula at Glenbeigh. Paul was enchanted by the area. ‘It is lovely. Wherever one turns there is material for dozens of pictures. I felt that if I spent a lifetime I would never exhaust all the possible subjects,’ he wrote to a friend, James Healy, in New York (letter of 13 December 1934, Healy Papers, Stanford University Libraries). The Peninsula produced a paler key in his paintings, as the Irish Times commented (7 May 1935), which contrasts with the heavier, more brooding works of the late 1920s and early 1930s when his marriage to his first wife, Grace, was breaking up and at a time when he had other domestic difficulties. By 1945, with a much more settled lifestyle, Paul and Mabel returned to Kerry-there is no record of their having been there since the 1930s-and, staying at Waterville, they used that as a base to explore much of the Peninsula. The area around Waterville has welcomed many celebrities over the years, the most notable, perhaps, being Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin. The Iveragh Peninsula, of course, is traversed by the famous Ring of Kerry tourist route. The stretch of water depicted in this composition is probably Lough Currane, which lies immediately to the east of Waterville, which is the town crowning the hilltop in the middle distance. The ‘paler key’ that typifies Henry’s work in these late years of his painting career-he suffered almost total blindness shortly after this picture was painted-is well seen in this composition, where the mounting cu- mulus clouds in the sky are reflected in the sea in the foreground, which is almost without detailing of any sort, save for the masterly dexterity of the brushwork. In this regard, Waterville, Co. Kerry may be compared with one of Henry’s finest late works, Kinsale, of 1939 (Kennedy, 2007, number 994). For a discussion of Henry’s other Iveragh Peninsula pictures see S. B. Kennedy, ‘Paul Henry’s Iveragh Paintings’, in John Crowley & John Sheehan (eds.), The Iveragh Peninsula: A Cultural Atlas of the Ring of Kerry, Cork University Press, 2009, pp.441-4. Dr. S.B. Kennedy, October 2018