Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, South Africa.

Exhibited
London, Grosvenor Gallery, 1888, no. 21.

Literature
Henry Blackburn, Grosvenor Notes, 1888, 1888, p. 10.
The Daily Telegraph, 'The Grosvenor Gallery - Second and Concluding Notice', 2 May 1888, p. 5.
Ida Hector, Cheltenham Examiner, 'The Grosvenor Gallery', 2 May 1888, p. 2.
Truth, 'The Grosvenor Gallery', 3 May 1888, p. 18.
The Graphic, 'The Grosvenor Gallery', 5 May 1888, p. 11.
The Athenaeum, 'The Grosvenor Gallery – Second and Concluding Notice', 19 May 1888, p. 638.
WH Bartlett, 'Coast Life in Connemara', The Art Journal, 1894, p. 248, illustrated.

In the nineteenth century a drama was frequently enacted in the west of Ireland. Having acquired their livestock at local fairs, smallholders, who tenanted land measured in terms of 'a cow's grass', would ferry their cattle to offshore island pastures.¹ This perilous task of transporting their purchases across deep treacherous sounds enabled their mainland soil to revive after a hard winter, and while one or two sheep or a young calf might be accommodated in a wooden curragh, or Galway hooker, neither was large enough to take several cattle. These animals had, effectively, to be towed to their new homes, their heads held firmly above the water level as in William Henry Bartlett's Returning from the Fair, Co. Galway. The authenticity of his painting is such that the heave of the long oars breaking the silver-grey waters can almost be felt.

Bartlett's first encounter with the west of Ireland came when he accompanied the American painter, Howard Helmick, probably in the summer of 1878.² So captivated was he, that after spending a winter in Munich, a further session at the atelier Julian, a season at Grez-sur-Loing, and visits to Venice and St Ives, Bartlett returned to Connemara around 1886 to paint The Last Brief Voyage (sold in these rooms, 10 July 2013, lot 115) for the Royal Academy of the following year. This sombre subject, based on an actual burial, sat within an almost lifelong commitment to the hard life endured by peasant farmers of the west. Attending the local fairs where sheep and cattle were exchanged, and witnessing vigils at wayside shrines, 'marked a mile-stone in my artistic life' he later wrote.³

Arriving in Roundstone in county Galway, with its majestic backdrop of the Twelve Bens, he recalled that 'my first sight of the beaches nearby made an unforgettable impression'.⁴ He was instantly charmed by the 'luminous opalescent grey sky' and the 'sea of the tenderest translucent green' – all effects that are seen in the present work.⁵ Some critics who reviewed the painting when it appeared in the Grosvenor Gallery in 1888, thought this must have been a scene in Scotland, but the light of Connemara was unmistakable. It was left to The Graphic to point out that the occupants were Irish and that the picture was 'firmly painted and effective'. This was translated as 'dash and vigour' in The Daily Telegraph, while The Athenaeum found this 'a capital subject', the treatment of the sea being 'somewhat rough' and 'the designing of the figures...excellent'.

The mistaken identity of people and place is, however, not insignificant. So pervasive was the imagery associated with the Irishman and his domain, that the rugged beauties of the Connemara went largely unrecognized. Faced in a prestigious exhibition, surrounded by cognoscenti and London's bourgeoisie, most Grosvenor Gallery visitors would only have the sketchiest idea of life in the estuary at Roundstone or on Galway's offshore islands. The heroism of Synge's Aran Islanders, Yeats's Man from Aranmore, 1905, and Orpen's Nude Pattern, The Holy Well, 1916 (both National Gallery of Ireland) was yet to come. Bartlett noted how superstition led to suspicion when he tried to find models or observe scenes like these. And were it not for the 'entrancing beauty' of the 'strands of pearly white sand' and 'exquisitely delicate green of the sea combined with the lovely blue of the Connemara mountains', he may have returned permanently to the crowded Venetian calli or the val-de-Seine and been less of a painter.

Indeed, such was the significance of the present imagery that he looked for it elsewhere in works such as A Breezy Crossing, 1983 (Cartwright Hall, Bradford City Art Galleries and Museums). Crossing the Seine at Caudebec with your flock was however an adventure of different order and while similar scenes could be witnessed in Donegal when Bartlett went there in the early years of the new century, Returning from the Fair, Co Galway, was the classic canvas from which others derived.

¹WH Bartlett, 'From and Island in the West', The Art Journal, 1908, p. 258.
²The contrast between Helmick's more traditional Wilkie-esque depictions of Irish life and Bartlett's modern, heroic men and women of the west is noteworthy.
³William Henry Bartlett, Impressions and Adventures of an Artist, n.d. [c.1920] (unpublished typescript, Private Collection), pp. 55-6.
⁴Ibid.
⁵ WH Bartlett, 'The West Coast of Ireland', in Charles Holme, ed., Sketching Grounds, 1909 (Studio Special Number), p. 120.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for compiling this catalogue entry.