An Irish Portrait (Paul Henry RHA) (1988)

Paul Henry was for long perhaps the best known painter of the landscape of Ireland. In An Irish Portrait, his autobiography, he appeared for the first time as a writer with a talent comparable to that for which he became famous as a painter. It was a talent which had much in common with J. M. Synge’s. Synge, in his books on Kerry and the Aran Islands, told of the people, and the archaic way of life, of these remote corners of Ireland. Similarly, Paul Henry in this autobiography writes of his experience in Connemara and Mayo and on Achill Island, and of the tremendous influence which his years in the West had on his work as an artist. Since the book is an autobiography the author writes also of his life and his friends, many of them famous, in Paris and in London where his early years were passed, but it is the chapters dealing with the West of Ireland which dominate the book, just as the influence of the West was to dominate his art.

The book will appeal to admirers of Paul Henry the artist partly because of its illustrations. There are eight plates which reproduce in full colour some of the artist’s most notable landscapes, and there are also reproductions in black and white of charcoal portraits of four West of Ireland peasants who became the author’s friends.

The appreciative Foreword by Sean O’Faolain pays tribute to Paul Henry both as an artist and as a writer. “I hope it will always be in print,” he writes. “As long as it is I feel sure that perhaps people will read it and love it and envy and be grateful to Paul Henry.”

Condition: very good. Neat previous owner’s signature to front endpaper