Patrick Hennessy studied art in Dundee, in Scotland, in the thirties and returned to his native Cork in 1939. He exhibited regularly in Dublin from 1941 to 1970 and also showed in Scotland. Portraits feature regularly in his early career. Later he turned more to landscape, spending several winters in north Africa and working in the West of Ireland and Cork in the summers.

His portrait of the writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) shows her standing probably at the head of the staircase at her family home, Bowen's Court, in north county Cork. Hennessy, whose painting style was based on a very sheer kind of illusionism, often with overtones of surrealism and magic realism, paints her as a handsome, rather severe looking woman. The cool colour palette and clarity of form are typical of much of his work.

Bowen was an only child, whose ancestors had settled in Bowen's Court in Cromwellian times. Her novel The Last September, set during the troubles of 1920, registers the plight of her class - the land owning Anglo-lrish - who were thereafter in decline. She sold Bowen's Court in 1959, and was grief-stricken when it was demolished. She had holidayed there frequently after moving to London, and often brought literary guests with her, including Virginia Woolf whose complaint about the moth-eaten carpets suggests something of the fading grandeur of the Irish Great House. Hennessy captures Bowen's staunchness in keeping up her great house, presenting the social rather than creative side of her personality.

[VR]

Lit. - Pyle, 1975 / Fallon, 1994