For its latest show, the Hunt Museum splits its basement gallery into two halves, with Jack Yeats to the left and Paul Henry to the right as you walk in. It’s an arrangement that sparks a competition, with an unexpected result.
For me, Paul Henry is the winner of this posthumous contrast. He catches the eye, holds the attention and makes unexpected moves, demonstrating a breadth of talent that’s been forgotten.
Yeats, his showier, more lauded opponent, manages only to distract with a few set pieces. Henry dominates the field, so to speak, and it’s a field in the west of Ireland.
One broad premise behind this show, Contrasting Visions of Ireland, is that for these two Protestant city men — Yeats born in London in 1871, Henry in Belfast five years later — the west was a potent symbol of the best of the Irish nation.
For these two artists, the west, both landscape and people, was the object of a visceral love affair; one to which their reputations are forever tied.
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From the age of eight to 15, Yeats was raised by his maternal grandparents in Sligo. Henry made his first visit to Achill Island in 1910, encouraged by JM Synge, whom he had met in Paris. He settled in Keel with his wife, the painter Grace Henry, until 1919. A painting in this show — Keel, Achill (circa 1910-1919) — bookends those dates. It’s a seminal work.
The exhibition features 51 paintings, from public and private collections, including the Ulster Museum’s entire Henry stock. Despite Yeats’s bigger, noisier, riskier late work, Henry’s side of the room is the riveting draw.
In the catalogue, there’s a photo of the two together, taken in 1952. Yeats is tall, balding, serious and angular; Henry is shorter, double-chinned, robust and jocular. Neither of them looks well; they were both dead within six years. Two different men, and very different painters.
In the middle of the room is a play-off. Henry’s Dawn, Killary Harbour (1921) hangs next to From Portacloy to Rathlin O’Beirne, Yeats’s 1932 painting of a man with his arms wrapped around the neck of a horse. The Henry is a ghostly pale, pastel-hued, flat, creamy painting, of a type at which he excelled. The landscape is built in layers: the foreground is made up of rocks and heathers, middle ground is a lake, the background is mountains, and above it all is sky. In the Yeats, a horse rears its black, white, yellow, green and blue head, its body painted with the same colours and blended strokes as the landscape, almost camouflaged. The owner is barely visible, his form becoming one with his equine charge. A high horizon tops it all with a yellow-orange rimmed blue sky.
Each men romanticised the west in a different way. This show includes remarkable deeper, richer early paintings by Henry, including An Irish Dance, Old People Watching a Dance (both 1910-1911) and A Prayer for the Departed (1919-1912), an intense, dark deathbed scene that recalls Munch. The mark of Henry’s Paris training can be seen elsewhere, in works such as The Tholsel, Kilkenny (1939), Mountain Cottage (1918-1919) and Grand Canal Dock, Ringsend, Dublin (1928).
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There are stunning Yeats paintings here too — not all of them from the west — such as Waiting for the Long Car (1947), A Dusty Lane in Kerry (1913), West Coast, Tralee Bay (1913), The Rifle Range (1924), Dublin Newsboys (1923) and Girls and Boys, a jaunty Dublin street scene from 1925.
Both men started out as commercial artists in London and played a role in establishing the iconography of the Irish Free State.
Henry’s work became synonymous with tourism imagery. More than 900 copies were sold of the London Midland and Scottish Rail poster which used his 1924 painting Connemara. His west of Ireland landscapes illustrated the 1932 Saorstat (free state) Handbook. In 1956, Bord Failte distributed thousands of posters of his Connemara Landscape throughout Europe. Henry’s images became popular through mass production.
Both artists were attracted by the simplicity and asceticism of the west and elevated it to an almost metaphysical concept of a place pure and untouched. Many of Yeats’s west of Ireland people feel more like types than individuals, as do Henry’s Old Woman (1914-16) or The Potato Digger (1912-1915), seen in this show too.
Henry was colour blind. He is best known for capturing those flattening “opalescent mists” which he described as transforming the scene so that “everything was veiled and yet revealed”. Here, colour is secondary; light and atmosphere are key. For Yeats, colour is primary, and carries emotion with it.
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As your eyes ping-pong from one side of the room to the other in Limerick, what becomes clear is that, while Yeats’s emotions explode onto the canvas in a splurge of colour and movement, Henry holds back, controlling his passions, confining himself with austerity to produce a more meditative image. Ooze and gush contrasts with cool reserve. Henry sets you outside the scene to observe it, Yeats inserts you right into it. Where Henry finds escape, Yeats often paints a trap. Where Yeats heads towards chaos, as in The Violence of the Dawn (1951) or The Tinker’s Child (1926), in which a baby is barely visible in an open cart, Henry goes towards calm, as in Lough Altan, Co Donegal (c1930).
Contrasting Visions does Henry a huge favour. It drives home that, while it may seem like he was repeating himself, he wasn’t. Henry made different stylistic decisions from Yeats, driven by feeling.
The impetus behind this show was the loan of Yeats and Henry works from the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg. Both artists had international reputations. In 1922, Henry sold a painting to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. His second solo show was in New York in 1932. Yeats showed in New York in 1913. His Picture of Life in the West of Ireland exhibition toured from Dublin to London in 1914. In the 1930s alone, his work was seen in London, Liverpool, Belfast, New York, Toronto and Pittsburgh and at the Chicago World Fair.
If toured internationally, this show could reinvigorate interest in these painters and, thus, the history of Irish art.
Jack B Yeats and Paul Henry: Contrasting Visions of Ireland, Hunt Museum, Limerick, until Sept 30
