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'Rathcoursey was the home of Captain John de Herez Smyth (1885-1959) and his two unmarried sisters, Julianna (1874-1966) and Frances (1878-1941). Exactly how and when Hennell first met them is unestablished, but from at least 1927 until 1940 he made annual visits to their Georgian home, which stands in a wooded, elevated setting overlooking an inlet of Cork Harbour. ... There are very few paintings of interiors in Hennell's art, but those he made at Rathcoursey House record his fondness for his friends' predominantly eighteenth-century home, the main part of which was built in 1773 by James Tynte Smyth (d. 1806), a sea captain. It was the latter's great-grandson who was Hennell's 'great friend'; Captain John de Herez Smyth.'
Jessica Kilburn, Thomas Hennell. The Land and the Mind, London: Pimpernel Press, 2021, pages 126 and 128
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