Howard Helmick 1840-1907

SOLD

Cottage Interior with a Family Gathered Around a Hearth

Oil on canvas, 54 x 75.5 cm.
Signed and dated ‘H. Helmick 1886’, lower-right

One of Howard Helmick’s most accomplished and assured Irish works, Cottage Interior with a Family Gathered Around a Hearth, shows three generations of a household. Two sisters – one standing, her elegant contrapposto only partially disguised by her heavy clothing, the other cradling a young girl in her arms – talk to their parents who are seated around the warming, if also symbolically charged, hearth. The cottage interior and its simple furnishing are accurately depicted. Although the young woman on the left and the child are barefoot, this is far from a destitute family, at least in the relative stakes of Irish rural poverty. As Brendan Rooney writes, Helmick ‘preferred comfortable, spacious cottage interiors to the cramped and often abject dwellings chosen as settings by other visiting artists to Ireland, such as Alfred Downing Fripp and Francis Topham’ (AAI, 2, 295). There are several sturdy pieces of furniture, including to the right an iron standing rush light. A three-legged stool in the foreground, next to which a wooden noggin has fallen on its side, is carefully placed within the balanced composition to draw the eye to the middle ground. With skilfully deployed chiaroscuro, Helmick creates a strong sense of depth with key details spotlit, in particular, the arms of the young woman on the left, the old woman’s outstretched hands, and the mother and child group. No likely source of light within an Irish cabin (which objects included here show was illuminated by candles), could have created these intense lighting effects. Helmick was no slice-of-life realist and he carefully and artfully composes his scene. Indeed, there is a strong sense of the stage set to the picture and it rather tellingly recalls photographs by Keith Pattison from the Druid Theatre’s 2005 production of the final scene of Synge’s Riders to the Sea (illustrated in Rhona Richman Kenneally and Lucy McDiarmid, The Vibrant House, Irish Writing and Domestic Space (2017) p. 101)

At the same time the characterisation of the individuals and the dynamic relationships between them are deftly sketched. With the success of the overall composition in mind, Helmick carefully selects which objects to include – and which to emphasise – and he relishes the opportunity to paint the fall of light, or indeed pooling shadow, on wood, ceramic, glass, fabrics of all sorts, and, indeed, perhaps particularly, flesh. The treatment of the still-life on the table on the left

is particularly masterly. In works such as this, though not always elsewhere, Helmick differs from most of the Victorian artists such as Erskine Nicol or James Brenan who depicted the Irish poor in a sometimes patronising and usually anecdotaliaing fashion – though there is a telling overlap between the rather petulant little girl here and the series of colleens that fellow American artist Robert Henri would later paint on Achill.

It is noticeable that Helmick, unlike Nicol and Brenan, was in contact with advanced artists such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler (who suggested he take a studio in the same building as his), and the American Impressionist, Mary Cassatt, who the artist visited in France: ‘Mrs Helmick to take the baths, and Mr Helmick to paint’ (Nancy Mathews, Mary Cassatt a Life (1998) p. 60). Indeed the tenderness and interlocking limbs of mother – or perhaps more likely aunt – and the young girl she embraces closely recall Cassatt’s images of rather more privileged maternal affection. The same family, with the elderly woman repeated almost verbatim, appears in Helmick’s Mending the Nets of 1886 (Adam’s, Important Irish Art, 28 September 2011, lot 13).