Thanks to the representational nature of his paintings, Patrick Hennessy's work has remained consistently popular in the salerooms and, during the past few years, it has seen a steady increase in price. Hennessy's reputation, while never soaring very high, did not dip low, either; he seemed to have found both his style and market relatively early in his career.
Pictures by this artist tend to come up regularly at auctions, such as that being conducted by John de Vere White next Tuesday, when Hennessy's archetypal The Canal at Wilton Place will be offered with an estimate of £4,000-£6,000.
Born in Cork in August 1915, Patrick Hennessy was brought up in Scotland, where he had been sent as a young child and where he studied at art college. It was only with the outbreak of the second World War in 1939 that he moved back to Ireland and began his career as a professional artist, showing at the Royal Hibernian Academy for the first time two years later.
For a long time, he was based in west Cork, travelling regularly elsewhere in Europe. In later years, he lived in Morocco but died in Portugal in December 1980.
Hennessy's style always showed restrained surrealist tendencies. In his Dictionary of Irish Artists, 20th century Theo Snoddy quotes the Dublin Magazine in 1944 as describing the artist's work as combining "a not-too-exciting realism, a low-keyed and consistent palette with a morbid pessimism which sees flesh as something very much less healthy than grass".
That sense of the less-than-healthy and the morbid is an abiding element in Hennessy's work. Many of the pictures, despite their almost photo-realist depiction of the mundane, suggest all is not what it seems. There is an unnatural stillness in his work and this, combined with Hennessy's subdued colouring, gives his paintings their memorable eeriness.
A regular exhibitor in Dublin, Patrick Hennessy was for many years associated with the Hendriks Gallery on St Stephen's Green, where the picture being offered by de Vere's was first shown in 1972. A review in the Sunday Independent in 1950 spoke of his "meticulous renderings of detail", while the Irish Times's art critic of the same year wrote that his paintings, although superficially academic in the most traditional manner, always "evoke a mood".
At the time of his death, Dr James White said the artist was "a fantastically developed craftsman" who as a young man might have developed into a surrealist, "but he never followed this up".
Prices for Patrick Hennessy's paintings have increased over the past few years. In March 1996, his Still Life Study with a Basket of Roses achieved a new record for the artist when it fetched £8,700 at the James Adam salerooms. In March 1997, at the same venue, that record was surpassed, with £10,000 being paid for Hennessy's The Flight of Wild White Horses. Last year, his Self Portrait - Through a Wardrobe Mirror with Still Life on a Table fetched £15,750 at Mealy's.
Accordingly, there should be considerable interest in the Hennessy picture offered at de Vere's on Tuesday; curiously, another of his paintings showing the Grand Canal is included in the exhibition at the Frederick Gallery in Dublin. Also offering work by Jack Yeats, Le Brocquy, Jellett, O'Conor, McGonigal and Middleton among others, the auction begins at 6 p.m. in the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Ely Place, Dublin.
