Paul Henry

Paul Henry, son of a Baptist minister, attended the Belfast School of Art at an early age. In 1898 he entered the Académie Julien in Paris and worked there in the studio of American artist James McNeill Whistler. In Paris Henry was influenced by the Impressionists Cézanne and Gauguin and the rural motifs of Jean-François Millet. In 1900, he returned to London and married his wife Grace (1868-1953), also a painter of note. When he visited the island of Acaill off the west coast of Ireland in 1910, he was so impressed by the landscape that he stayed there for 10 years.

Subsequently, he settled in Dublin, where he painted his last picture showing a human figure in 1920, after which he concentrated on idealized nature scenes, some of which he painted for advertising posters commissioned by railroad companies. Together with his wife, Henry was one of the founders of the Society of Dublin Painters and became a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1929. Already partially color blind, he lost his sight completely in 1945, and then moved to Bray. Only after the death of his first wife in 1953 did he remarry, although the marriage had already broken up in the late 1920s. A major retrospective of his works was held at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2004. In 1951 he published his 116-page autobiography, An Irish Portrait, which, however, is considered unreliable. With this book, he was represented in 1952 in the literature category, but never entered one of his paintings.