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Description: inscribed l.r.: Gola Island black chalk

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Dimensions: 31.5 by 24 cm.; 12 ¼ by 9 ½ in.

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Provenance: Tom Driberg, later Lord Bradwell;
John Stanley Clarke;
Christie's, 4 March 1988, lot 170;
Thomas Agnew & Sons, London, where bought by Sir David Scott in 1981

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Published: Sotheby's, Pictures from the Collection of Sir David and Lady Scott, 2008, pp. 176-177.

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Notes: Henry Lamb first visited the remote Irish island of Gola in 1912. Lying off the coast of Donegal, Gola is the largest of the Gweedore Islands, the windswept home of a small population of hardy fishermen and their families and a large colony of seabirds nesting on the granite cliffs. Gola was the birth place of the renowned writer Seán 'ac Fhionnlaoich and was immortalised in the children's song Báidín Fhéilimí ("Féilimí's Little Boat"). The island is now a rather lonely and eerie place in the winter when the holiday-makers have been driven homeward by the storms and gales that sweep across the island where most of the houses are derelict. Lamb was instantly struck by the charm of the island and wrote of his first impressions, 'I find myself in paradise... the people are more lovely and more angelically dispositioned than on the mainland'. He subsequently returned to Gola later in 1912 and spent much of the following year on the island with the McGinley family. The emotive impact of the island greatly affected the artist who would later describe Gola as 'my half-loved, half-dreaded little exile'. Fisherfolk of 1913 (Fig 1. private collection) is considered by many to be his most impressive work, and one of the great poetic works of British figurative art from the early twentieth century. The pose and features of the boy in the present work bear a marked resemblance to the figure visible in the upper left quarter of Fisherfolk.

Another drawing for a head of one of the boys in Fisherfolk, which was also owned by Lord Bradwell and John Stanley Clarke was sold by Peter Nahum at the Leiceseter Galleries.