Brian Fallon

The blurb for this handsome volume claims that Henry is Ireland's 'greatest 20th-century landscape painter', something which is open to debate. The show at the National Gallery four years ago contained a core of works which were masterly in their way, yet overall it left me with oddly mixed feelings. There is no doubt at all, however, that Henry has come back like a ricochet from the low state of his reputation barely forty years ago. During his lifetime he was frequently ranked alongside Jack Yeats, but he was not even dead when progressivists were already writing him off as a combination of period sentimentalist and stilted academician.

Dr Brian Kennedy has been studying and cataloguing Henry's work for some decades now and can be presumed to know more about it than anyone else alive. What he has produced is invaluable as a catalogue and reference book, though I could have wished for a more hands-on visual format - the plethora of small black-and-white (sometimes grey-and-white) reproductions no doubt performs an essential function, but there are rather too few big colour plates for my taste. The biographical section, however, is particularly useful.

Henry's early work contains a great deal of illustration, mainly produced in order to earn a living, and on the whole he was very good at it. The man certainly could draw, though I have a hunch he was better at static subjects than in representing movement. He was also a fine portraitist, without rising to the level of Yeats the Elder. But in general, the early, Whistler-influenced works would not raise him very high among his contemporaries. Like most Irish painters of the time he was soaked in French influences, but though Henry was no reactionary he was never a School of Paris Modernist either. What he got from Continental art was the last, powerful wave of the rural Realism which dates back to Millet and fired the mind of the young van Gogh. Daumier was another potent influence, as he was on Orpen and the young Jack Yeats.

Henry's encounter with the West of Ireland really made him as a painter, giving him his central theme just as the contemporaneous Worpswede Group found theirs in the North German plain and a richly talented nucleus of young Danish Realists found it in the windswept beaches of Skagen. (It was a period when many painters were fleeing the cities and identifying with simple folk who worked with their hands or earned their bread the hard way.) Henry, in fact, virtually created our image of the Western landscape and seascape, simplifying it drastically and giving it a certain monumental, timeless aura. He knew his peasants and fishermen at first hand and neither condescended to them nor sentimentalised them. His pictorial formats may have been a little four-square and predictable, but they are architecturally solid and seize upon the basic elements in what he saw and felt. There are no 'props' or deadening detail, it is almost all stark, bare and functional. And though never a colourist, he was a master of 'tone', whether rendering the dawn light on the sea or a stretch of bogland under vast, overhanging Atlantic skies.

The Henry of this 'middle period' is arguably a major painter, and it is on this phase that his reputation rests and will rest. It made him more or less the painterly laureate of the new Free State, few people realising then that he was already past his meridian. The fact is, Henry lacked invention - always his great shortcoming, in fact his only real one - and the later work becomes increasingly repetitive, while his inborn touch with paint gradually deserted him. Eye problems, and perhaps the realisation that he had said his say, helped to close a career which petered out rather than ending conclusively. But if he was, on the ultimate count, rather a limited artist, he was powerful and convincing inside his limitations and emotionally honest to the core. Some of our public art institutions might now consider creating a Paul Henry Room; after all, it is at least half a century overdue. The wheel has come full circle, as it has a way of doing - though unfortunately, too few of Henry's smug detractors of yesterday are alive to be made eat their words.

Brian Fallon is the author of Irish Art 1830-1990.