Catharine, 1913

Robert Henri’s fame as a portraitist rests on his many spontaneously painted images of people whose appearance fascinated him rather than on his commissioned portraits. Such rapidly painted character studies of people with whom the artist felt a strong spiritual empathy, like this young girl, enabled him to portray a wide spectrum of humanity that would have been unavailable in conventional commissions. Henri explained:

The people that I paint are ‘my people,’ whoever they may be, wherever they may exist, the people through whom dignity of life is manifest, that is, who are in some way expressing themselves naturally along with the lines Nature intended for them. My people may be old or young, rich or poor. . . . But wherever I find them, the Indian at work in the white man’s way, the Spanish gipsy moving back to the freedom of the hills, the little boy, quiet and reticent before the stranger, my interest is awakened and my impulse immediately is to tell them through my own language—drawing and painting in color.[1]  [1]
Robert Henri, “‘My People’: By Robert Henri,” The Craftsman 27 (Feb. 1915): 459.

Chief among Henri’s subjects were the young children whom he met during his travels. He felt that their faces reflected a primal innocence that had not yet been corrupted by the rigors of life:

If you paint children you must have no patronizing attitude toward them. Whoever approaches a child without humility, without wonderment and without infinite respect misses in his judgment what is before him, and loses an opportunity for a marvelous response. Children are greater than the grown man. All grown men have more experience, but only a few retain the greatness that was theirs before the system of compromises began in their lives. I have never respected any man more than I have some children. In the faces of children I have seen a look of wisdom and of kindness expressed with such ease and such certainty that I knew it was the expression of a whole race. Later, that child would grow into being a man or woman and fall, as most of us do, into the business of little detail with only now and then a glimmering remembrance of a lost power. A rare few remain simple and hold on through life to their universal kinship, wade through all detail and can still look out on the painter with the simplicity of a child and the wisdom of the race plus an individual experience. These, however, are rare, but the potentiality exists in all children.[2]  [2]
Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, comp. Margery Ryerson (New York, 1923), 237–238.

Catharine was painted in June 1913 during Henri’s first visit to Achill Island, County Mayo, off the west coast of Ireland. He had originally intended to spend the summer in Woodstock, New York, but the stress he had endured during and after the Armory Show led him to seek seclusion in the country where his second wife, Marjorie Organ, had been born.[3]  [3]
Bennard B. Perlman, Robert Henri: His Life and Art (New York, 1991), 110. He also traced his ancestry to Ireland, and in New York had befriended the expatriate Irish portraitist and writer John Butler Yeats, father of the noted poet William Butler Yeats. After traveling around the country the Henris decided to stay near the isolated fishing villages of Keel and Dooagh, remaining there until the end of September. Henri returned to Achill Island regularly until his death in 1929.

William Innes Homer regarded 1913 as the beginning of “the third and final period in Henri's artistic development,” and noted that this first trip to Ireland “served as a catalyst that led him to a fresh approach to painting.”[4]  [4]
William Innes Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle (1969; rev. ed., New York, 1988), 247. On Achill Island Henri painted landscapes and portraits of local villagers, including a large number of children. In a letter to John and Dolly Sloan, Henri’s wife reported that “Bob expects to do great things—millions of all kinds of children in the most primitive dresses—the[y] weave and dye their own goods—and the effects are stunning.”[5]  [5]
Marjorie Henri to John and Dolly Sloan, July 5, 1913, quoted in Revolutions of Realism: The Letters of John Sloan and Robert Henri, ed. Bennard B. Perlman (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 216–217. The description that Henri gave his friend and patron William J. Johnson about how he came to paint Catharine captures the flavor of his remote location:

It was done last summer in Ireland. We lived for three months on Achill Island (county Mayo) and my studio and our residence, as well, was ‘Corrymore house’ that was built on the wild, boggy side of Croaghan above the little village called Dooagh where Catharine lived. Captain Boycott—whose name has become a dictionary word—was the builder of ‘Corrymore’ and he lived there for many years. Dooagh is a mile below (and two to walk) at the water’s edge—a very old, primitive and very poor village made up of little white cottages, with walls of heavy stone, thatched roofs, and smoke from the turf fires coming always from the chimneys.            

Catharine’s house was on the main road. The people fished and tilled what soil they had made possible among the rocks and on the bogland—a wonderful good natured people with the richest voices I have ever heard. There was still boycotting going on, local war waged against the balifs [sic], land-leaguing and a lot of that which goes to make up the story of Ireland. We had a wonderful summer with nothing in the world to do but work . . . Catharine’s father fished and had his potato patch—just enough to keep things going.[6]  [6]
Robert Henri to William J. Johnson, Nov. 5, 1913, NGA Library, Rare MSS 6, digitized 2015; copy in NGA curatorial files.

Henri stated that Catharine was related to Brien O’Malley, the elderly subject of his Guide to Croaghan [fig. 1]  

Because of its immense charm, spontaneity, and appealing subject, Catharine has always been one of Henri’s most popular and reproduced portraits.[9]  [9]
It is illustrated in Nathaniel Pousette-Dart, Robert Henri (New York, 1922), n.p.; William Yarrow and Louis Bouche, Robert Henri: His Life and Works (New York, 1921), op. p. 104; Bennard B. Perlman, “Robert Henri,” Arts Digest 28 (Aug. 1, 1954), 15; and Alfredo Valente, Robert Henri: Painter, Teacher, Prophet (New York, 1969), op. p. 105. Oscar Johnson provided a letter he received from Robert W. Macbeth on Dec. 28, 1936, concerning Henri’s sister-in-law Violet Organ’s desire to use a reproduction of Catharine for the frontispiece of the second edition of The Art Spirit. Much of the painting’s success can be attributed to Catharine’s extraordinarily expressive eyes. Homer’s observation about another of Henri’s portraits of an Irish child, Patrick (1913, private collection, Shawnee Mission, KS), is also appropriate here: the artist drew attention to “the alert glance of the eyes peering intently at the spectator—one of Henri’s favorite devices for establishing the subject as a living, communicating being.”[10]  [10]
William Innes Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle (Ithaca, NY, 1969; rev. ed., 1988), 252. The exceptionally vigorous brushwork is typical of Henri’s work of this period, and the bright palette, with its complex gradations of fleshtones, reflects the influence of Hardesty Gillmore Maratta’s system of color theory.[11]  [11]
For a discussion of Maratta’s influence on Henri, see Michael Quick, “Robert Henri: Theory and Practice,” in Valerie Ann Leeds, My People: The Portraits of Robert Henri (Orlando, FL, 1994), 47–62. Shortly after Johnson acquired the painting, a Pittsburgh critic pronounced it one of Henri's “best, most interesting and most attractive child pictures. Workmanship broad and sure, masterly, with great richness of surface and harmony of tone; full of loving tenderness, of vitality and feeling of childlife; beautiful, charming, a canvas that would command attention and admiration in any collection.”[12]  [12]
Victor Rowland, unidentified Pittsburgh newspaper, November 1913, quoted in Oscar Doyle Johnson to J. Carter Brown, Feb. 9, 1972, NGA curatorial files. According to the donor, the dealer William Macbeth’s son Robert deemed it Henri’s second best work after Lady in White (destroyed) and referred to it as the “million dollar Henri” in the belief that it would someday fetch that sum.[13]  [13]
Oscar Doyle Johnson to John Walker, June 17, 1948, NGA curatorial files. The donor furnished a typed transcript of a letter from Robert W. Macbeth to William J. Johnson, October 28, 1913, in which he wrote, “If you aren’t as crazy about this little Catharine as I am and if your friends among the artists don’t congratulate you unanimously, I'll very much miss my guess.” The donor also provided two typed transcripts of letters from Macbeth to Johnson of February 7 and 24, 1914, in which Macbeth discusses arrangements for including a photograph of Catharine in a forthcoming sales catalog. In the second letter he wrote, “You may look forward to seeing ‘Catharine’ reproduced as typical of Henri’s work in our booklet. I wish it were as typical in subject as it is in its painting, but the trouble is with Henri’s other subjects—not with ‘Catharine.’ I wish he always turned out pictures as attractive as she.” Apparently the painting was never reproduced in the catalog.

Robert Torchia

August 17, 2018