Patrick Anthony Hennessy

The Paintings of Patrick Anthony Hennessy

Born in August of 1915 in Cork, Patrick Anthony Hennessy was an Irish realist painter known for his landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and trompe l’oeil paintings. Often considered an outsider of latter day Irish painting, he developed a distinctive personal style of carefully observed realism executed with highly finished surfaces that he faithfully followed throughout his career.

After his father’s battle death in 1917 during World War I, Hennessy’s mother remarried to John Duncan from Scotland in 1921; the family relocated to Arbroath, a royal burgh on the coast of Scotland where Duncan’s relatives resided. During his primary education at the Arbroath High School, Hennessy showed an aptitude for art and graduated in 1933 with the honor, Dux for Art, and an accompanying medal. In the autumn of that year, he entered the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee where he studied drawing and painting under portrait painter Edward Baird and noted landscape painter James McIntosh Patrick.

Patrick Hennessy, in addition to his art studies, wrote a ballet entitled “Paradise Lost” which was performed at the college in 1935. In each year of his course, he gained a First Class Pass, as well as winning first prize in 1934 and 1936 for the work he produced during summer breaks. Hennessy graduated with a First Class Distinction in 1937 and, with a scholarship, earned his Post-Graduate Diploma in 1938. During his studies, Hennessy met his life-long partner, British-Irish landscape and portrait painter Harry Robertson Craig who was also attending courses at Dundee. Aside from the period between 1939 and 1946 when they were separated by the war, they spent the rest of their lives together.

A month after finishing his post-graduate work, Hennessy entered his paintings in a group exhibition at the Art Galleries in Arbroath. Awarded an Annual Traveling Scholarship for further studies in Italy and France, he traveled to Europe in June of 1938. In Paris, Hennessy reunited with two friends, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde. whom he had met the previous year. Known as the two Roberts, these painters and theater set-designers had established both a lifelong romantic relationship and a professional collaboration in their art. Hennessy and the couple traveled together through the south of France until their arrival in Marseilles at the end of 1938.

Upon his return to Scotland, Patrick Hennessy was selected for the residential summer course at the historical arts center, Hospitalfield House, under painter James Cowie, an artist of detailed draftsmanship based on studies of the Old Masters. Two of Hennessy’s paintings from this period were accepted for the Annual Exhibition held by the Royal Scottish Academy. With war looming in the autumn of 1939 and feeling disenchanted by his time at Hospitalfield House, he made the decision to return to his native Ireland. On his arrival in Dublin, Hennessy was offered an exhibition in December of 1939 at abstract artist Mainie Jellett’s Country Shop gallery on St. Stephens Green in the city center.

After his well received exhibition, Hennessy was invited to join the Society of Dublin Painters with whom he would exhibit annually during the 1940s and early 1950s. Beginning in the early 1940s, a visual homosexual subtext began to be incorporated into some of Hennessy’s paintings. In addition to the work he produced for exhibition in this period, he also received many portrait commissions from clients. Hennessy began a long relationship with the Royal Hibernia Academy in 1941 with the acceptance of three of his paintings for their annual exhibition; he exhibited with the academy virtually every year from 1941 until his death.

In 1946, Patrick Hennessy reunited with Harry Robertson Craig who had recently been discharged from the intelligence branch of the British Army where he served during the Second World War. Prior to his service, Craig had extensively traveled throughout Europe where he painted landscapes and portraits. Hennessy and Craig soon moved to Crosshaven in Cork and later to the seaport town of Cobh on the southern coast of County Cork. In 1948, Hennessy had an exhibition at Dublin’s Victor Waddington Gallery, which had emerged as Ireland’s most important modern art venue. After a year as an associate, he became a full member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1949.

Hennessy’s work became noticed in North America when his published work “De Profundis” was included in the Contemporary Irish Painting Exhibition that toured various cities on the continent. The 1950s brought Hennessy a retrospective of his work from 1941 to 1951 at the Dublin Painters Society and several painting excursions to Italy and Sicily. One of his works at this time, “Bronze Horses of St. Marks”, was exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1954. In 1956, Hennessy had two major solo exhibitions of his work: London’s Thomas Agnew Gallery which showed thirty-eight paintings and Dublin’s Ritchie Hendriks Gallery which would be the main outlet for his work over twenty-two years.

In the winter of 1959, Patrick Hennessy became seriously ill with pneumonia. As a consequence, he and Harry Craig decided to spend the winter season in Morocco. After 1959, they never spent a full year in Ireland and increasingly spent time abroad. In the 1960s, Hennessy continued to be true to his personal style; however, as he did not follow the current trends in art, he began to receive less favorable reviews from the art critics. Finally in 1965, Chicago’s Guildhall Gallery, which had accepted his work for years, offered Hennessy a major exhibition in 1966. The success of which enabled him to become an artist with work on permanent display at the gallery and a scheduled annual exhibition.

In 1968, Hennessy made a permanent move to Tangier, Morocco where he painted prolifically for nine years to keep up with the demand from both the Hendriks and Guildhall Galleries as well as the Royal Hibernian Academy. A highly successful retrospective of Hennessy’s work was held in 1975 at the Guildhall Gallery. Three years later, he had his last show in Dublin at the Hendriks Gallery. After his move with Harry Craig to the Algarve in Portugal, Hennessy had little contact with Ireland and began to have health problems that soon grew more serious. In November of 1980, Craig brought him to a London hospital for treatment. Diagnosed with cancer, Patrick Hennessy died on the thirtieth of December in 1980.

Following cremation, Patrick Anthony Hennessy’s ashes were buried in London’s Golders Green Crematorium. He had left his entire estate to Harry Robertson Craig, with the proviso that on Craig’s death the Royal Hibernian Academy should be the beneficiary. Upon Craig’s death in 1984, this legacy was used to set up the biennial Hennessy Craig Scholarship for aspiring artists. Hennessy’s work, in addition to many private collections, can be found in major public collections including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Ireland, the University Colleges of both Cork and Dublin, and the Crawford Art Gallery, among others.

Note: The Irish Museum of Modern Art has an excellent article on Patrick Hennessy’s connections which such figures as Francis Bacon, Elizabeth Bowen, Roger Casement and other artists. This Modern Irish Masters article can be found at: http://www.modernirishmasters.com/context/patrick-hennessy-context/#stags

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Patrick Hennessy and Harry Robertson Craig”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Boy and Seagull”, 1949, Oil on Canvas, 52 x 38 cm, Irish Museum of Modern Art

Third Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Cliffs of Etretat (Self Portrait)”, 1962, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Portrait of Elizabeth Bowen at Bowenscourt”, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 91 x 71 cm, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland

Bottom Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Men Bathing, Etretat”, circa 1954, Oil on Canvas, Date and Location Unknown

John Minton

The Artwork of John Minton

Born in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire in December of 1917, Francis John Minton was an English illustrator, painter, stage designer and educator. He studied art at St. John’s Wood School of Art in northern London from 1935 to 1938. Minton was introduced to the work of the French Neo-Romantic painters by his fellow student Michael Ayrton, who would become renowned for his writings and sculptural work. Between 1938 to 1939, he spent eight months studying art in France, often in the company of Ayrton, until the start of the second World War necessitated his return to England.

In 1941, John Minton joined the Pioneer Corps, a division of the British Army combatant corps used for light engineering tasks. He received a commission in a light infantry regiment in 1943, but was discharged in the same year on medical grounds. While in the army, Minton, collaborating with Michael Ayrton, designed sets and costumes for actor and theater director John Gielgud’s 1942 production of “Macbeth”. In the same year, they presented their paintings in a joint exhibition at London’s Leicester Galleries. Minton’s intense, realistic work was expressed in dark color schemes and included a self-portrait and cityscapes of streets and bombed buildings.

During the war years, Minton met painters Adrian Ryan and Lucian Freud and developed a close friendship which soon became an intimate sexual relationship with both men that lasted until the late 1940s. After he had seen Freud’s portrait of Francis Bacon, Minton commissioned in 1952 his own portrait from Freud. Between 1943 and 1946, Minton taught illustration at London’s Camberwell College of Arts. He often attended late night sessions at The Colony Room Club, a private members’ drinking and social club known for its debauchery, and visited jazz clubs that dotted London’s Soho district.

After he left Camberwell College, John Minton served as the head of the drawing and illustration department at the Central School of Art and Design from 1946 to 1948. During these years, he continued his own work and shared a studio, first with painters and theater set designers Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, and later with painter Keith Vaughan, all of whom were artists of the Neo-Romantic circle in that immediate post-war period.

Minton began a prolific period of work after 1945; besides entries in group exhibitions, he had seven solo shows at London’s prestigious Lefevre Gallery before 1956. Minton, in addition to creating his paintings and illustrative work, also became a tutor of painting in 1949 at the Royal College of Art, where he taught until the year before his death. By the mid-1950s with the arrival of the newly popular American Abstract Expressionism, Minton’s commitment to figural composition had begun to be seen as out-dated.

John Minton returned to the world of the theater and accepted a commission to design stage sets for two productions by playwright Ronald Duncan for London’s Royal Court Theater, “Don Juan” and “The Death of Satan”. While working at the theater, he met Kevin Maybury, an Australian carpenter working in the scenery department. A relationship soon developed and, by the winter, Maybury had moved into Minton’s house in Chelsea. Maybury became the model for several drawings by Minton and also posed for a portrait in which he is shown seated in his workshop surrounded by the tools of his trade.

Finding his work out of fashion and suffering from psychological problems, Minton began to self-medicate with alcohol. In April of 1956, he left the Royal College of Art on a one-year unpaid leave; his departure caused by a lack of confidence in his own ability as both teacher and painter, and by deep-seated doubts about the relevance of painting in the modern world. He started suffering from extreme mood swings and became more dependent on alcohol. John Minto was found dead on the 22nd of January in 1957. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

John Minton’s final work, an ambitious large-scale painting, was incomplete at the time of his death and depicted a gravely injured man surrounded by distraught onlookers. On the day before Minton’s death, the painter Ruskin Spear had visited him at his studio and was told that Minton identified the dying figure with Hollywood actor James Dean, who had died two years previously in a car accident. The painting, known as the 1957 “The Death of James Dean”, is clearly unfinished; there were indications through friends that Minton never intended to finish it as he was worried about not being able to break out of his past style.

Minton’s range of work was wide and included designs for stamps, textiles and wallpapers; posters for the London Transport system and Ealing Studios, a television and film producer; large scale paintings for the Royal Academy and the Dome of Discovery exhibition space at the 1951 Festival of Britain; and numerous landscapes of the British countryside. However, he is best remembered for his illustrative work for books, both interior work and book jackets. Among these are poet Alan Ross’s travel book “Time Was Away-A Notebook in Corsica”, author Herbert Ernest Bates’s “The Country Heart”, and two ground-breaking cook books by food writer Elizabeth David.

Note: A history of the relationship between John Minton, Lucian Freud and Adrian Ryan, interspersed with images of their work, can be found at the online Museum Crush magazine located at: https://museumcrush.org/art-sex-and-death-the-unholy-trinity-of-freud-minton-and-ryan/

Top Insert Image: Rollie McKenna, “John Minton”, 1951, Bromide Print, 24.5 x 19.4 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Second Insert Image: John Minton, “John Minton”, circa 1953, Oil on Canvas, 35.6 x 25.4 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Third Insert Image: John Minton, “The Life Model”, 1948, Oil on Canvas, 63.5 x 76 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: John Deakin, “John Minton, Soho”, 1951, Gelatin Silver Print, Michael Hoppen Gallery

Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde

The Two Roberts: Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde

Robert MacBryde was born in Maybole in Ayrshire in 1913, Colquhoun in Kilmarnock in 1914. From poor, working-class backgrounds, they met at Glasgow School of Art in 1933, and soon became lovers. In 1941 they moved to London where they became part of the celebrated Soho set that included artists such as Bacon, Keith Vaughan and John Craxton, and the poets Dylan Thomas and George Barker. Colquhoun specialised in figure painting, MacBryde in still-life. Hard drinking, volatile and uncompromising, their lives were as passionate and compelling as their art.

The Lefevre Gallery on Bond Street held a string of successful shows of their work; the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate acquired paintings. By 1950 they were among the most famous artists working in Britain. But as abstraction became the dominant force in European art in the late 1950s, and as their drinking increased, so their popularity suffered. Colquhoun died penniless in 1962, aged just 47; MacBryde was knocked over by a car and died in 1966. Few artists have catapulted to celebrity or descended into obscurity so swiftly: their remarkable careers lasted scarcely twenty years.

The top four oil paintings were done by Robert Colquhoun; the bottom four oil paintings were done by Robert MacBryde.