Arts International

Paul Henry

Irish, 1877 - 1958

Paul Henry was born in Belfast and attended the Belfast School of Art. He travelled to Paris in 1898, where he studied at the Academie Julian and was influenced by the rural realism of Jean Francois Millet. He later moved to Academie Carmen recently opened by James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In Paris he met his first wife Grace and in 1903 they were married. In London where he worked until 1910 illustrating books and magazines, Henry moved to Achill Island in 1912, where the local landscape became the main subject for his oil paintings.

In 1920 Henry moved to Dublin where, along with his wife and other painters such as Jack B. Yeats and Mary Swanzy, he helped found the Society of Dublin Painters. He stayed in Dublin for twelve years, with frequent trips back to the West of Ireland, and then moved to Co. Wicklow with the artist Mabel Young, who he married in 1954. Widely considered the most significant Irish landscape painter, Paul Henry's works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Ireland, Hugh Lane Gallery, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ulster Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and National Museum of Modern Art in Paris.