His hyper-realistic paintings — landscape, portrait, still life — had an unsettling quality.
The Irish art world didn’t know what to make of him. No-one else in Ireland made comparable work and, as Sean Kissane, curator of Patrick Hennessy: De Profundis, IMMA 2016 wrote: “Many of his works were comprised of visual codes that signified clear narratives of homosexual life.”
Most people didn’t want to look at that in detail. Hennessy was dubbed a Surrealist, which sidestepped the uncomfortable issue of queerness.
By the 1970s Hennessy and his partner, Henry Robertson Craig, had settled in Tangier, where there was a strong creative community of gay men.
Hennessy’s work, previously coded with hidden references to sexual identity, became more explicitly gay.
An art collector who attended his 1970s openings at the Ritchie Hendriks gallery in Dublin reported “a frisson” among the (mostly closeted) gay community.
The art critic Bruce Arnold was downright scathing: “Hennessy’s exhibition is full of stupid pictures of young men standing around on beaches in their underpants.” Now, these paintings are held in high regard.
There are four paintings by Hennessy in Adam’s Important Irish Art sale, which takes place on Wednesday March 27.
The finest, Rebuilding Of Monte Cassino, 1951 (Lot 20: est. €10,000 to €15,000) is a landscape, showing the bombed-out abbey under reconstruction.
The Italian monastery, founded by St Benedict of Nursia in 596 AD, had been destroyed by American-led air raids in the Second World War.
Allied Forces assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that the Germans were using Monte Cassino as an observation post and reduced it to rubble in February 1944.
Both the Germans and the allies had assured the Vatican that the monastery would not be attacked. Thinking it was safe, many local civilians had taken shelter there — around 250 of these died in the bombing.
Eighty years on, the apportioning of blame, for their deaths and for the destruction of the heritage site, is still ongoing.
When Hennessy visited, seven years after the bombing, reconstruction was underway.
His painting shows ruins in the foreground and the abbey under scaffolding beneath a dappled sky. It encapsulated a moment in history showing wholesale destruction with a glimmer of hope.
Harry Robertson Craig On Dun Laoghaire Pier, 1953 (Lot 122: est. €1,000 to €2,000) is a portrait of Hennessy’s partner.
He stands, hands in pockets, a picture of 1950s respectability in jacket, shirt and tie.
Behind him, a boy points out something to a man with binoculars. It’s a classic father-and-son vignette and points to an aspect of society from which Craig, as a gay man, was forever excluded.
Both paintings come from the collection of Pamela and George Fegan, who purchased them directly from the artist.
This is their first outing on the auction circuit. George Fegan (1921-2007) was a medical doctor who also collected Irish antiques, mostly silver, and paintings by Irish artists.
He is most famous for his treatment of varicose veins. Anecdotally, Fegan was Hennessy’s doctor and went on to become a collector of his paintings.
Like Hennessy, Fegan retired to Africa for the sake of his health and ended his days on Lamu, an island off the Kenyan coast.
Patrick Hennessy’s Never Ending Summer
Hennessy exhibited Never Ending Summer (Lot 3: est. €6,000 to €8,000) at his annual exhibition at the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery in 1964.
By this time, he was spending much of his time in Morocco. His doctors, possibly including Fegan, had recommend he avoid Irish winters for the sake of his health.
The painting is an imagined landscape with a bunch of red roses in the foreground. It’s a motif that he used many times. An entry-level Hennessy, Rose Study (Lot 21: est. €800 to €1,200), shows a rose without the eerie landscape.
Henry Robertson Craig (1916-1984) was also an artist, although not as good as his partner.
The Fegans collected his work too, including Café de la Paix (Lot 23: est. €7,000 to €9,000), a peaceful Parisian café scene.
The historically interesting H.E. Mr Leopold Senghor, President Of Senegal, In Procession In The Champs Elysees, Paris (Lot 123: est €3,000 to €5,000) shows the cavalcade of motorcycles around the car of Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), Senegalese poet, cultural theorist and the first president of Senegal.
See adams.ie
