Beschreibung:

A LANE IN COUNTY DOWN James Humbert Craig RHA RUA (1877-1944)
Signature: signed and dated [1916] lower left; remains of three labels on reverse Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 76 by 61cm., 30 by 24in. Provenance: John Magee, Belfast; McClure collection; Sold through Henry Morgan, Belfast, to the present owner Exhibited: RHA, Dublin, 1917, catalogue no. 168 Although J. H. Craig was born in 1877 he began to paint seriously only around 1910 . Thus, while he was thirty-nine in 1916 when he painted this picture, it is, in reality, an early work. In these yea... ars, during which he lived with his parents in a large and commodious house, ‘Craigalea’, at Bangor in Co. Down, his subject matter was in the main drawn from areas close to home, namely Bangor, Groomsport and the shores of Belfast Lough. Only occasionally did he spread his wings to the north Antrim coast and Donegal and those other areas with which he is now so closely associated. A Lane in Co. Down, therefore, marks the end of the earliest phase of his work and looks forward to the whole of his later career. The lane depicted in this painting is located in an area known as the Minnowburn Beeches. The Minnowburn is a tiny tributary of the river Lagan, still surrounded as then by splendid beech trees. It joins with the Lagan close to Shaw’s Bridge on the southern outskirts of Belfast. It is most likely that Craig had painted the area previously, for in 1910 he showed a watercolour, Wood near Shaw’s Bridge, at the Belfast Art Society’s annual exhibition. Six years later, he showed there another watercolour - a possible study for the larger oil, also called A Lane in Co. Down. The most striking thing about the present picture is the theatrical juxtaposition of the heavily shaded foreground and trees with the patches of dappled sunlight which break through in the middle distance and the bright, wind-blown sky, the two areas dividing the picture almost diagonally. This tonal theatricality, which has a hint of Barbizon about it, is unusual for Craig who generally preferred to record with uncanny realism the essential visual effect of a scene. Or, as John Hewitt more poetically put it, to catch ‘the swift notation of the insistent effect, the momentary flicker, the flash of light, the passing shadow’, attributes which might be regarded as the hallmark of his art. The loose Impressionist palette and brushwork, however, are typical of Craig’s oeuvre in general. This work appears to have been early acquired by a private collector and has been in private hands ever since. For a discussion of Craig’s career see S. B. Kennedy, With an Angler’s Eye: the Art of James Humbert Craig W & G Baird in association with the Ulster Museum, Belfast, 2001. 2 John Hewitt Art in Ulster: 1, Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1977, p. 83. Dr S. B. Kennedy Belfast, August 200 more