Grace Henry HRHA (1868-1953)

Grace Mitchell (1868-1953) was raised in Aberdeen, and exhibited her early work with the Aberdeen Artists Society. Leaving Aberdeen around 1899, she pursued her artistic studies in Brussels in the Ernest Blanc Garic Academy. The Academy accepted female students, but they had to use a separate entrance. In Paris, she attended the Decluse Academy, and then the Academy Julian where she met Paul Henry. Through Paul Henry, the American artist James McNeill Whistler came to influence her work, leading to the prevalence of nocturnal scenes and affecting her choice both of subject and colour.

Her painting The Girl in White (1912 Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin) is reminiscent of Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862, National Gallery of Art, Washington) in its subject, its controlled brushwork and as a tonal study.
Paul Henry and Grace Mitchell were married in London in 1903, having moved there a couple of years earlier to further their artistic careers. Their trip to Achill in 1910, intended to last a fortnight, became a nine-year stay. Both artists painted extensively during these years, but in very different styles. Paul Henry’s Irish landscapes are typically muted in tone and focus on lake and mountain scenes. In contrast, Grace Henry often painted nocturnal scenes,working out of doors but using artificial lights to aid her in her compositions. In Evening Star, Achill (1912, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin) her use of colour is particularly striking in the vivid blue of the sky. Her works from this period show both the use of a rich palette, and a concern with atmospheric effects. She also painted figural groups in the west of Ireland. Top of the Hill (c.1920, Limerick City Gallery of Art) is a warm scene which gives a sense not just of the western landscape, but also a sense of the community. The painting shows a group of women stopping for a chat at the top of a hill. One woman looks out of the painting, smiling at the viewer. Their shawls and head-scarves, and the green fields and rolling clouds, are typical of portrayals of rural Ireland. However, Henry’s style, with its bold colours and heavy outlines, is very striking.

Along with her husband Grace Henry was a founding member of the Dublin Society of Painters which sought to promote young Irish artists. During the 1920s and 1930s she travelled in France and Italy, training under André Lhote, whose students Evie Hone, Mary Swanzy and Mainie Jellett were to bring Cubism to Ireland. However, his influence is not as strong on Grace Henry’s work, which never fully adopts a Cubist style. Grace Henry’s work has often been overshadowed by that of her husband, and the inscription on one of her paintings in the Hugh Lane Gallery reads “Mrs Paul Henry”. However, an examination of their work shows that Grace Henry was the more adventurous of the two – her works are more varied, and show modern influences, such as that of Cubism and Japanese prints. The Henrys exhibited together in St Stephen’s Green Gallery and the Magee Gallery in Belfast, among other venues, up until their formal separation in the early 1930s. Following this, she continued to travel and to paint. Grace Henry was made an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1949 and her work can now be seen in many Irish art institutions.

Maurice MacGonigal PRHA (1900-79)

The landscape and portrait artist Maurice MacGonigal was born in Dublin, becoming a design apprentice in his Uncle’s firm which designed and produced stained glass. MacGonigal’s cousin, the artist Harry Clarke (who married the painter Margaret Crilley) gave him much encouragement.

MacGonigal mixed politics with art studies, managing within a few years to be interned at Ballykinlar Camp, take drawing and figure drawing classes at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (now the National College of Art and Design) and win the Taylor Scholarship in painting. He also won the Tailteann silver medal for landscape.

After a visit to Holland in 1927, where he studied fine art painting at the Hague, he returned to Dublin where he taught in the Royal Hibernian Academy Art Schools and also at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art becoming a very influential teacher and eventually Professor of Painting.

Influenced in his art by Sean Keating, Maurice MacGonigal maintained a particularly fruitful association with the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), exhibiting each year from 1924 to 1978 a total of more than 200 paintings.

He was elected an academician of the RHA in 1933. In addition, he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), London and the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.

He was elected a member of the board of Governors and Guardians of the National Gallery of Ireland as well as the Keeper of the Academy from 1936-1939 and President from 1962-1977. For much of his artistic career, MacGonigal was an influential figure in the visual art scene of Ireland, representing the more academic and conservative trend or style of art, as opposed to the more avant-garde approach of Mary Swanzy, Nora McGuinness and Louis le Brocquy.

Maurice MacGonigal had solo exhibitions at both Victor Waddington Galleries, (1944) and Taylor Galleries (1978) in Dublin, while in 1991 the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery staged a retrospective of his works. He showed at numerous Oireachtas. MacGonigal’s work is now represented in all major collections of Irish art, including: Ulster Museum, Belfast; Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork; Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; Limerick City Gallery of Art (includes National Collection of Contemporary Drawing); Waterford Municipal Art Gallery Collection.

Most Expensive Painting By Maurice MacGonigal

The auction record for a work by Maurice MacGonigal was set in 2006, when his landscape painting, entitled Harbour at Roundstone, Connemara, was sold at DeVeres, in Dublin, for €32,000.

Maya Kulenovic

Maya Kulenovic’s works have been exhibited in over twenty solo exhibitions and more than forty group shows and art fairs in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, USA, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey. Her paintings can be found in significant collections around the world.

She studied art at London University of the Arts (at Chelsea College of Art and Design) in London, England (Masters of Arts 1998), Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto (AOCAD Honours, 1997) and Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul (1992-1995). She is also an alumna of London Goodenough College in London, England (1997- 98).

Maya Kulenovic is a Canadian painter, currently based in Toronto. She was born in 1975 in Sarajevo (SR Bosnia and Herzegovina), SFR Yugoslavia.

The above & all the images here were taken from Maya’s website: http://www.mayakulenovic.com

Many more works and much more information about this fascinating & talented artist are to be found there.

Jack B Yeats (1871-1957)

Jack Butler Yeats was born in London in 1871, the youngest son of Irish portraitist John Butler Yeats, and the brother of the Nobel Prize winning poet William Butler Yeats. He studied painting and drawing at the Westminster School of Art under Fred Brown, before leaving to work as a graphic artist, cartoonist, illustrator and water-colourist.

While he began using oils from about 1897, Yeats did not regularly produce oil paintings until 1905, preferring to work in watercolours. His early artworks were romantic depictions of landscapes and figures from the west of Ireland, particularly from his home in Sligo. He was influenced by the French Impressionist masters in the art collection of Sir Hugh Lane and began exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1899.

After residing in London, he lived in Devon (England) for fourteen years, before moving to Greystones in county Wicklow. In 1917, he moved to Dublin. From around 1920, he developed a much more Expressionist style, moving from illustration to symbolism.

Sympathetic to but not active in the Irish Republican movement, he began to produce emotional, yet realistic, paintings of urban and rural life in Ireland. At the same time, he started using a wider and brighter range of colours – often applied very thickly with implements other than a paint-brush – along with free and loose brushstrokes. His compositions included genre paintings of circuses, music halls, and horse races, sombre landscapes of Ireland’s west coast, as well as scenes from Celtic mythology. In 1924, he was awarded the silver medal for painting at the Tailteann Games.

After the death of his wife in 1947, to whom he had been happily married since 1894, his work became increasingly nostalgic. Retrospective exhibitions of his paintings were held at the National Gallery, London, 1942, in Dublin 1945, in the London Tate Gallery 1948, while a showing of his last works was staged at the Waddington Galleries, London, in 1958.

Although some critics have dismissed Jack B Yeats’ artwork as irrelevant, an exhibition of his paintings at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, in 1971, revived his reputation as perhaps the most important modern painter in the history of Irish art. Jack B Yeats passed away in Dublin on March 28, 1957.

Charles Lamb RHA (1893-1964) Ireland

The Irish landscape artist, portrait and figure painter Charles Lamb was born in  County Armagh. He studied painting and life-drawing at night classes at Belfast School of Art, before winning a scholarship to the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1917 where he came under the influence of Sean Keating. He began exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1919, and thereafter averaged about 4 paintings per show until his final years. The following year he painted his masterpiece “Dancing At A Northern Crossroads”.

In 1922 Charles Lamb went to Connemara, settling in a remote Irish-speaking part of  County Galway. In 1923 he was elected ARHA and from then on year-after-year he held regular solo exhibitions, showcasing over 50 landscapes in 1924 at the St Stephens Gallery. In 1925, he travelled in Ireland and in 1926 he toured Brittany. More exhibitions followed, in Belfast, Waterford, Brussels, Boston and New York. In 1928 he visited the Aran Islands. In 1930 (along with Hans Iten, Frank McKelvey and others) he was elected one of the first members of the Ulster Academy of Arts. In 1935 he returned to Connemara where he established an art summer school. In 1938 he was elected a full member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). Later that year he travelled to Germany. In 1941 he exhibited in Northern Ireland at Belfast and Portadown, while his “Bringing Home The Seaweed” was presented to the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin. He continued painting actively right up until his death in 1964.

In a different way to the idealised scenes of Sean Keating, Charles Lamb was one of the first painters to paint a type of heroic Western peasant, thus marking the difference both between the rural and the urban, and between Irish culture and one with English, European and American influence.

Charles Lamb’s paintings are represented in many collections including: the Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin; the National Gallery of Ireland; the Limerick City Art Gallery; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork; and many others.

George Campbell RHA (1917-1979)

One of Ireland’s foremost landscape artists and still-life painters, George Campbell was born in County Wicklow and received his schooling in Dublin. His mother was the noted artist Gretta Bowen. George Campbell started painting in Belfast in 1941, partly as a reaction to the wartime bombing of the city. He first exhibited in 1944, alongside his friend Gerard Dillon, with whom he shared painting trips to Connemara. He first showed at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1948, in company with Dillon and Daniel O’Neill, and continued to show at the RHA over the next 30 years.

Campbell’s artistic range included landscapes, still-lifes, figure painting and historical works. He won the Douglas Hyde Gold Medal for both the best history painting at the Oireachtas and for the best landscape. He painted in watercolours, oils, and mixed media, and produced a number of etchings and crayon drawings. He also undertook several commissions in stained glass. In 1951, George Campbell made his first visit to Spain, a country which so captivated him that he returned there to paint nearly every successive year. This Spanish influence appears in his work in the form of bullfighters, gypsies, street scenes and musicians. He exhibited several times in Madrid, even learned to play the guitar, and was honoured as a Knight Commander of Spain in 1977.

Campbell’s paintings appeared in many exhibitions during his lifetime. He had his first showing at Belfast’s Mol Gallery in 1944, then in 1946 he exhibited at Waddington Galleries in Dublin – the first event in a long association with the art dealer Victor Waddington. His artworks also showed at the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, the Tom Caldwell Gallery, and at the IELA, the Oireachtas, and the water Colour Society of Ireland (WCSI). The Northern Irish Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) sponsored a number of solo exhibitions for Campbell in 1949, 1952 and 1960, being then replaced by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for one-man shows in 1966 and 1972. George Campbell’s pictures are represented in most major public and private Irish collections of art.

Campbell was appointed an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1954 and a full member in 1964. The Water Colour Society of Ireland (WCSI) elected him a member in 1954. Both the BBC and RTE screened profiles of Campbell in the 1970s. He died in Dublin in 1979.

Most Expensive Work by George Campbell

The auction record for a work by George Campbell was set in 2007, when his landscape painting, entitled Evening In Connemara, was sold at Sotheby’s, London, for £50,400.

Mary Swanzy (1882 – 1978) Ireland

Mary Swanzy often defined herself as a woman who grew up in an era when Ladies have to paint pussy-woosies and doggie-woggies. Swanzy painted neither, working outside the accepted conventions during her long career. Independent and confident, she pursued what intrigued her, regardless of fashion or current movement. As a result she explored numerous styles throughout her lifetime and was one of the first women to paint in the cubist style.

Mary Swanzy grew up in an upper-class family that encouraged her artistic interests. She attended art school in Dublin. Like many artists of her time she found her way to Paris and was included occasionally in the salon of Gertrude Stein, one of  modern art’s most important patrons. There she became acquainted with the work of Matisse and Picasso, Cezanne, Gauguin and Daumier. Despite these revolutionary influences, Swanzy’s formal education encouraged an appreciation for artists of the Renaissance. Each of these influences find their way into Swanzy’s art.

After Paris, Swanzy returned to Dublin where she was one of a handful of talented female artists working in Ireland including Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. Swanzy’s family urged her to follow the conventional path of Ireland’s artists, which meant becoming a portrait painter and teaching. While neither of these pursuits interested Swanzy, to support herself she did some portraits as well as illustrations for periodicals.

Her first one woman show in 1913 opened to mixed reviews. The negative response from a conservative Irish public did not discourage the artist from pursuing her own path. Soon thereafter the death of a parent broke up her home but brought financial independence and Swanzy responded by traveling the world. In 1914, in an exhibition at the Salon des Independents, Swanzy exhibited alongside other modernists including Robert Delaunay whose Orphic-Cubist works influenced her direction. In 1916 Swanzy was included in an exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery in London and the following year she exhibited again in the Salon des Independents in Paris.

Some contemporary historians have noted that Swanzy’s gender may have done more to free her than restrict her. Swanzy had the resources and the leisure to pursue what she wished. She was not obligated to generate income or concerned about establishing a reputation. Had Swanzy been born male, it might have been more difficult to resist the pressure to work in the accepted style and cultivate a following. Today Swanzy’s reputation as the first Irish cubist is secure.

It is difficult to determine exactly when Swanzy painted the images included here. Like many other artists of the time, she did not date her works, but the influence of cubism and futurism on these paintings cannot be denied. Swanzy borrows the cubist strategy of fragmenting the form, and combines it with the futurists’ approach of layering pattern to simulate motion. The skillful use of color and light, the considered placement of curved and angular forms work to make these two images among Swanzy’s most compelling. There is a dynamism and energy evident that many modernists sought in their work.

More than likely these paintings were done sometime between 1914 and 1925 after she had digested the influences of cubism and before her cubist style softened, becoming less mathematical and more lyrical. Cubist Study of Skyscrapers illustrates how Swanzy was influenced by her travels. In this painting the arched doorways of Southern Europe are projected into futurist skyscrapers. Her choice of earth tones for the Italianate architecture and the bolder tones of purples and yellows for the skyscrapers add to the sense of the past evolving into a brighter future. This painting glorifies the city to come, containing the upward, forward motion typical of futurist images.

The same celebration of technology’s promise can be found in Futuristic Study with Skyscrapers and Propellers where the surging diagonal of the whirling propellers illustrates the hope and trust placed in the new machine age. The motion and the dynamic lines that cut through this composition link it with the more formal properties proposed by futurists. The fragmentation and expression evident in these canvases link Swanzy with the cubism of Robert Delaunay and Jacques Villon.

Swanzy’s passion for travel took her all over the world, including Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. In 1924 and 1925 she lived in Honolulu and Samoa. Swanzy worked and painted in response to each location. In 1926 Swanzy settled in South London where she lived for the remainder of her life. In 1943 she had a one person exhibition at the Dublin Painter’s Gallery. After that she participated in group exhibitions around London, which included paintings by other important modernists like Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, Marc Chagall and Henry Moore.

Like many, Swanzy was deeply affected by the despair and destruction created by World War II. From 1945 until the end of her life she painted using allegory and symbolism. Toward the end of her life, the work became more lyrical, less disturbing. Mary Swanzy lived the latter part of her life in obscurity in London but continued to paint up to her death at age 96. Ten years before she died, Swanzy was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin.

This profile originally at: http://jlwcollection.com/jlwcollection.com/JLW_Collection.html

Peter Curling

The Irish equestrian artist and horse portrait painter Peter Curling was born in Waterford in 1955. His exceptional talent as a teenage artist led to his first exhibition in the racing centre of Lambourn at the age of 14, followed by sell-out shows in Dublin.

Not long after, Curling caught the attention of both Aylmer Tryon, art-dealer and founder of the Tryon Gallery, and the renowned horse portraitist Susan Crawford. Acting on their advice, Peter Curling went to Florence (like Niccolo D’Ardia Caracciola before him) where he spent two years studying drawing and fine art painting under the master artist Signorina Simi, a contemporary of Annigoni. He also learned the depiction of movement and speed from studying sculpture under John Skeaping.

Returning to the UK, Curling enjoyed several successful exhibitions in London and Ireland before deciding to relocate permanently to Ireland. In 1977, he moved to Tipperary, a famous horse-breeding and horse-training region and rapidly established himself as leading equine painter in the world of visual art in Ireland. For the next 15 years or so, Curling focused on almost exclusively on horse portraits, but such repetition understandably caused a degree of creative stagnation. His response was to widen both his subject matter and artistic locations. He spent more time on landscape painting and sought inspiration in Venice. In addition, he began producing cartoons and caricatures of individuals from the world of racing.

Peter Curling had his first London solo exhibition at the Tryon Gallery in 1978 and has shown there regularly ever since. His paintings of horses have also been exhibited in Lexington, Saratoga and New York. In 1992 he had a very successful exhibition in Dublin at Jorgensen Fine Art.

The auction record for a work by Peter Curling was set in 2006, when his horse-racing painting, entitled The Scarteen Point-to-Point, Kilfeacle, was sold at Christie’s, in London, for £66,000.

Frank McKelvey RHA RUA (1895-1974)

The Irish landscape artist and portrait painter Frank McKelvey was born in Belfast in 1895. Initially a poster designer, he studied drawing and painting at the Belfast School of Art where he won the Charles Brett prize for figure drawing in 1912.

His drawings from the nude also received commendation, and in 1914 he won the Fitzpatrick prize for his figure sketches. In 1917 he won the bronze in Dublin’s Taylor art competition.

Frank McKelvey first attracted attention with his pictures of ‘old’ Belfast, and his landscape painting. In 1917, his artwork was accepted by the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) when he was only 23. For the next fifty-five years he showed every year at the RHA. In 1919, he showed five paintings at the Water Colour Society of Ireland exhibition. In 1921, McKelvey was elected a member of the Belfast Art Society. He was appointed an associate member ARHA of the RHA in 1923, and in 1930 he became a full member. In 1930, along with Hans Iten, Charles Lamb and others, he was elected one of the founding academicians of the Ulster Academy of Arts.

Frank McKelvey’s paintings were shown at various exhibitions during his lifetime, including: the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts; the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery; the exhibition of Irish art in Brussels (1930); the Hackett Galleries, New York; Ulster House, London; Contemporary Irish Art exhibition in Aberystwyth; Royal Ulster Academy; Royal Hibernian Academy; the Oireachtas; solo shows at Locksley Hall in Belfast, Victor Waddington Galleries in Dublin and Ulster House in London. During his career, McKelvey was thought of as being on the same artistic level as the landscape artists Paul Henry and James Humbert Craig. However, McKelvey was also a prolific and skilful portraitist, painting the portraits of a wide range of subjects including: thirteen US Presidents with roots in Ulster. He also executed a number of marine and naval paintings.

Frank McKelvey died on June 30, 1974. Five years later, an exhibition of his oils and watercolours was held at The Oriel Gallery, Dublin. Examples of his art can be found in numerous public and private collections, in Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

Most Expensive Work by Frank McKelvey

The auction record for a work by Frank McKelvey was set in 2005, when his painting, entitled The Good Companions, was sold at Whytes, Dublin, for €102,000.