The Village by the Lake

Paul Henry often made a number of compositions of similar subjects and this bears a close resemblance to his West of Ireland Landscape with Cottages, 1924-25, and a picture of the same title, The Village by the Lake, 1925-30 (S.B. Kennedy, Paul Henry: with a catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations, New Haven and London, 2007, nos. 614 and 632). He also frequently included in exhibitions of ‘Recent Paintings’ works done much earlier. Thus this picture, which dates from 1924-25, was also exhibited in his 1935 and 1946 exhibitions. Although painted in the West of Ireland, one cannot be sure of the precise setting for the picture. The distant mountain may be Corraun, near Achill Sound, but of this one cannot be certain. However, the strip of dark blue high ground running the width of the picture is a device that Henry often used as a means of concentrating one’s attention on the mountain behind, which is picked out with gentle modelling. The cloud, dominating the sky, and which is rendered with little impasto, is also typical of Henry and contrasts with the heavier impasto of the brushwork in the middle distance and the immediate foreground and which aids a sense of recession. Inscribed with the title on the reverse.

We are grateful to Dr. Brian Kennedy for preparing this catalogue entry.