Paul Henry, Irish, 1876-1958
Title: The Potato Diggers
Date: 1912
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
51 x 46 cm
Signed: lower right: PAUL HENRY 1912
Credit Line: Purchased, 1968
Object Number: NGI.1870
Exhibition HistoryPaul Henry Retrospective, Trinity College Dublin, 1973
The Irish Impressionists, Irish Artists in France and Belgium, 1850-1914, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 9 October - 18 November 1984; Ulster Museum, Belfast, 1 February - 10 March 1985
The Irish Impressionists, Irish Artists in France and Belgium, 1850-1914, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 9 October - 18 November 1984; Ulster Museum, Belfast, 1 February - 10 March 1985
Label TextOne of Henry’s few dated works, this picture owes an obvious debt to Jean-François Millet, who Henry is known to have admired in his youth. Henry would have seen in Paris Millet’s celebrated painting The Gleaners, from which the bending figure in his own painting is derived. Though small, Henry’s painting also boasts a monumentality characteristic of Millet’s work. Henry had great regard for the islanders of Achill, who he first encountered in 1910, noting their ‘incessant toil with the spade; ploughs useless on most of those stony fields’.