Paul Henry

Career & Biography

Identity

Born

11 April 1876, 61 University Road, Belfast, Ireland

Died

24 August 1958, Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland (buried St Patrick's cemetery, Wicklow)

Family

Third of four sons of Rev. Robert Mitchell Henry (Reformed Presbyterian, later Baptist, then Plymouth Brethren) and Kate Anne Berry; brother Robert Mitchell Henry was a classical scholar and Professor of Latin at Queen's University Belfast.

Gender

male

Full Name

Paul Henry, RHA, RUA

Nationality

Irish (Ulster-born; worked in Ireland, London and Paris)

Note on Dates

Some auction houses (Adam's, Artnet, Invaluable) list 1877 as birth year; scholarly consensus and the Dictionary of Irish Biography give 11 April 1876.

Career Timeline

• 1898 — travels to Paris; absorbs Millet's rural realism and Whistler's tonal reduction
• 1903 — marries Scottish-born painter Grace Mitchell (Grace Henry) in London
• 1900s–1910 — London: illustration, teaching, pamphlet writing
• 1910 — first visit to Achill Island, Co. Mayo with Grace, prompted in part by J.M. Synge's 'Riders to the Sea'; first exhibits at the Royal Hibernian Academy
• 1910/1912–1919 — resident on Achill Island; peasant-subject and landscape phase (potato digging, turf cutting, seaweed harvesting, fishing)
• 1919/1920 — moves to Dublin; co-founder (1920) of the Society of Dublin Painters with Grace Henry, Jack B. Yeats, Mary Swanzy and others; member of the United Arts Club
• 1920s — designs railway/travel posters (notably a Connemara landscape) that circulate his imagery nationally and shape the popular image of the West of Ireland
• 1924 — begins relationship with painter Mabel Young; separates from Grace Henry in 1929
• 1926 — elected Associate, Royal Hibernian Academy; 1928 — full member (RHA)
• 1930 — among the first twelve academicians of the Ulster Academy of Arts (RUA)
• 1930s — moves to Co. Wicklow with Mabel Young; continues West of Ireland and Kerry subjects, often from memory in the studio
• c.1945 onward — failing eyesight effectively ends the painting career; turns to writing
• 1951 — publishes autobiography 'An Irish Portrait' (Batsford, London)
• 1953 — marries Mabel Young after Grace Henry's death
• 1958 — dies at Bray, Co. Wicklow

Education and Training

• Methodist College Belfast from 1882 (began drawing regularly); Royal Belfast Academical Institution from 1891, where drawing master John Sumner encouraged him
• Belfast School of Art / Government School of Design, Belfast (fellow student William Conor)
• Paris, 1898: Académie Julian (teaching associated with Jean-Paul Laurens) and subsequently Whistler's Académie Carmen
• London years (c.1900–1910): worked as illustrator for books, magazines and newspapers; encouragement from Walter Sickert; supported himself teaching and writing

Notable Personal Factor

According to his biographer S.B. Kennedy, Henry was colour blind — a condition not publicly known until c.1973, when it was revealed by his doctor at the time of the retrospective; this materially informs readings of his restricted, tonal palette.

⚠️ Identity Disambiguation

Issue

The supplied Getty ULAN record (ID 500332088, 'Henry, Paul', French photographer, 1849–1901) does NOT correspond to the artist whose market data and aesthetic fingerprint were supplied (Evening, Killarney; Connemara bogland; Post-Impressionist oil landscapes). Those belong to PAUL HENRY RHA (1876–1958), the Irish landscape painter.

Research Focus

This report profiles PAUL HENRY RHA (1876–1958), Irish painter — the artist with the live market and the supplied aesthetic fingerprint. A section on the French photographer is included at the end of bio_data.

Museum Data Caveat

The supplied museum hit-counts (Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian, Cleveland, Europeana) are very likely a MIXTURE of the two Pauls: the Metropolitan Museum, AIC and Smithsonian hold Henry-brothers astronomical photographs, while the Irish painter's holdings are concentrated in Irish/UK/French institutions. Name collision confirmed; do not merge.

Getty Record Person

Paul (Paul-Pierre) Henry, French astronomer/optician at the Paris Observatory who, with his brother Prosper-Mathieu Henry, built a photographic refractor in 1885 and produced pioneering astronomical photographs (Moon, star fields, Carte du Ciel project). Dates commonly given as 1848–1905 for Paul-Pierre and 1849–1903 for Prosper; Getty gives 1849–1901.

Influences Context Contemporaries

Influences

Jean-François Millet (peasant iconography, rural realism); Whistler (tonal reduction, Académie Carmen); the Barbizon plein-air tradition; Cézanne and Gauguin cited for simplification of form; literary stimulus from J.M. Synge

Art Historical Context

Central to the visual construction of national identity in the early Irish Free State; regarded as the father of an inter-war Irish school of landscape painting alongside Craig and McKelvey

Contemporaries and Peers

Jack B. Yeats, Grace Henry, Mary Swanzy, Sean Keating, William Conor, James Humbert Craig, Frank McKelvey, Harry Kernoff, William John Leech, Roderic O'Conor, Sir John Lavery, William Orpen

The Other Paul Henry Getty Record

Identity

Paul(-Pierre) Henry, French astronomer, optician and photographer, Paris Observatory; worked in partnership with his brother Prosper-Mathieu Henry

Significance

Inherited (1872) a sky-mapping project; from 1884 applied photography; built a photographic refractor with a precision clock drive in 1885; charted tens of thousands of stars; endorsers of the Carte du Ciel photographic sky atlas; discovered 14 asteroids and, on plates of 16 November 1885, the nebulosity around Maia in the Pleiades (NGC 1432)

Market and Institutions

Albumen lunar and stellar prints held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (e.g. 'Lunar Photograph, South Pole'; 'A Section of the Constellation Cygnus', 13 August 1885) and by university/scientific repositories; appear at auction as photographic lots (e.g. Bonhams, 'The Moon at 167 hours', Paris Observatory, 27 March 1890). A wholly separate, low-value market from the Irish painter's.

Studio Practice and Working Methods

Plein-air observation on Achill and in Connemara/Kerry, but many finished canvases were produced from memory in the studio — local residents on Achill were reportedly reluctant on superstitious grounds to be sketched or painted. Small oil-on-panel field studies (c.25 x 31 cm) feed larger easel canvases (typically 14–20 in.). Heavily loaded impasto, palette knife and stiff brush, alla prima wet-into-wet skies. He occasionally asked his Achill friend Johnny Tom Owen MacNamara to supply Irish-language titles for pictures.