Olive Henry HRUA (15 January 1902 -8 November 1989) was a Northern Irish artist known for her painting, photography and stained glass design.
[15] The Robinson and Cleaver Art Gallery staged a display of works from Four Ulster Artists in 1936 consisting of paintings from Henry, her sister Marjorie, Theo Gracey, and F H Hummel.
Henry contributed Green Boat,[16] which she had presented earlier in the year to the Ulster Academy of Arts,[7] and included Off the Scilly Isles amongst pictures from Brittany and Bavaria.
[17] The Royal Hibernian Academy displayed two small works Flight, 1941 and Lakeside amongst an unusually large contingent of Ulster artists in the annual exhibition in the spring of 1942.
Henry displayed a sense of humour in her use of black-out paint, roadblocks and air raid shelters in one of the watercolours on show.
[20] In 1945 Henry and her sister Margaret joined the Campbell brothers Arthur and George, Colin Middleton, Gladys and Max Maccabe, Tom Carr, Maurice Wilks, James McIntyre and others, in the only official exhibition from the Ulster branch of the Artists' International Association sponsored by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (NI) at the Belfast Museum.
[25] Henry debuted at the 1948 Irish Exhibition of Living Art with one painting and returned in each of the subsequent ten years with a total of 20 pictures.
[3] Henry displayed one work Harbour, Northern Ireland with Violet McAdoo at the 88th exhibition of the Society of Women Artists at the Royal Institute Galleries in London during the summer of 1949.
[27] Just a few months later Henry's work was back in London for the United Society of Artists annual exhibition where she showed Gossip and Shell and Sail.
[32][33] One critic commented that the show was"...one of the most vital and interesting exhibitions that CEMA has sponsored -a belated but welcome tribute to an artist, who has received all too little public recognition.
Her pictures Man and Ropes and Riviera Port, well defined and carefully abstracted, contrast in form with Deborah Brown's freer Oil Over Tempra,[sic] 1959.
"[34] A group exhibition In 1964 at the New Gallery in Belfast included work from Henry alongside Neil Shawcross, Max Maccabe, Kathleen Bell, Richard Croft and Helen Ross.
[35] In 1965 Henry joined twelve Ulster artists including Alice Berger-Hammerschlag, Basil Blackshaw, Colin Middleton, Romeo Toogood, and Mercy Hunter in a diverse exhibition of landscape paintings at the Arts Council Of Northern Ireland Gallery.
[37] A retrospective of Henry's studio works was hosted by the Shambles Gallery in Hillsborough, County Down in 1986, some thirty years since her last solo exhibition.