James Humbert Craig was born in Belfast but grew up in the countryside of county Down. Forsaking a career in business, he briefly attended Belfast College of Art, leaving to become a largely self-taught painter of landscapes. These brought him early popularity; he exhibited regularly at the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1915 and was elected to both Irish academies in 1928. Following somewhat in the vein of Paul Henry, Craig dramatised the landscapes of Ireland, concentrating on quintessentially 'Irish'; locations such as Donegal, Connemara and the Glens of Antrim, where he had a house. As an artist he did not look abroad to the radical ideas of Modernism, but aimed instead to develop a suitable voice for his specifically Irish subject matter.

Going to Mass is, on the surface, a very simple picture. It is no doubt its simple assertion of rural piety which made it so widely popular in reproduction after the artist's death. It may not have been the artist's intention when he painted this picture in the 1930s, but like Keating's Men of the South, it characterises a powerful aspect of Irish public identity in the early years of the nation's independence, albeit very differently. The virtues represented here could be read as those of the young nation itself; faith, frugality and community. Like the world represented, the colours are consciously sober and the raw beauty of the landscape is paralleled in the rugged paintwork. Craig never developed an interest in figure painting, and typically puts little detail into his mass-goers here. The anonymous impression they present, of collective devotion, is in marked contrast to Keating's art of individualised heroes.

[WG]

Lit. - Kennedy, S B, 1991 / Murray, 1992