It was just a snap of four men standing in a ballroom in the middle on the sixties but, years later the sight of Henry Caslin, Father Gerry Lee, Jimmy Mimnagh and Seamus Mc Keon together could be interpreted very differently. That was what would make Mc Keon search for it. From this moment frozen in time The Photograph sets out to retrace the stories of four men. Sweeney draws his masterful portraits convincingly and with great poignancy, tracing the four men from their humble beginnings through four decades of public and private life. An extraordinarily rich narrative emerges, in which the personal stories of the central characters and the larger issues of Irish National politics and identity are woven together to show the brutality and the tenderness, the ambiguities and the certainties, the comedy of half a century of Irish life.
Henry stands alone as the most influential landscapist to work in Ireland in the twentieth century.
Brian Kennedy tells the story of Henry's life and artistic achievements from his Protestant Belfast upbringing and his early artistic studies under Whistler in fin de si cle Paris, where he was strongly influenced by Post-Impressionism, to the holiday on Achill Island in his native Ireland that changed his life and after which, transfixed by the landscape, the people of the island and their way of life, Henry devoted his career to painting Irish life and landscape, introducing a degree of Realism that was new in Irish painting. A painter in her own right she emerges here from behind the shadow of her husband as a more substantial figure than has been previously recognised. Kennedy vividly brings to life the artistic worlds of Belfast, Paris, London and Dublin, all the while setting Henry's life against the backdrop of one of the most revolutionary periods in recent Irish history. Generously illustrated in colour throughout this volume will stand as a highly important contribution to Irish art. Home Bookshop Art Galleries Book Bindery Gifts Comments Kennys Bookshop and Art Galleries, High Street, Galway, Ireland.