Thursday, May 10, 2012

From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 adults, $8 students/seniors, $30 family pack (2 adults, 4 children))
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland" is the first exhibition to examine the American artist's work focused on the Irish landscape and people, particularly children, created between the time of his first trip to Ireland in 1913 and his last trip there in 1928. Long celebrated as an iconic American artist due to his important early work as a teacher and as the leader of The Eight, Henri's paintings have received less attention on their own. Most projects explored his career as it related to his role as a member of The Eight or in a broadly retrospective manner. Few projects focused on his landscapes, drawings, or foreign portraits.

Henri's Irish portraits constitute his largest focused body of work, and often depict the same sitters year after year. These paintings offer a unique and fascinating window onto the genre about which Henri felt most strongly--portraiture--and also chart his experiments with paint handling and color theories over time. He wrote that the time spent in Ireland was extremely valuable to him (it was the only other place besides New York where he purchased a residence), for only there was he able to focus on his painting without the distractions of life in New York. It is not surprising, then, that the periods Henri spent in Ireland were among his most prolific, and the paintings produced there among his most accomplished. Just before his death, Henri composed a list of his most important paintings; many of the works on this list were his Irish subjects. Forty-one paintings of Irish people and landscapes will be on view in the upcoming exhibition.