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Jack B. Yeats

1871–1957

 

Jack Yeats was the brother of the poet WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS [8], and the son of the painter John Butler Yeats.  Without doubt, he is the greatest Irish painter of the twentieth century, in a class which includes whatever great masters one would like to mention.  Some would say he is the greatest Irish painter of all time.  These may seem to be extravagant claims, but his work has these important distinctions.

      Jack Butler Yeats was born in London on 29th August 1871, while his father was living there in hopes of making a career as an artist.  But though delighted with many aspects of city life, it was rural Ireland that awakened the boy's imagination when he was sent home at the age of eight to stay with his grandparents in Sligo, on the western coast of Ireland.  To the end of his life his drawings and paintings were filled with images and scenes from the world that he then began to explore.

      Though his education was skimpy, he began studying in art colleges in his teens, and contributed black-and-white drawings to various papers and magazines in London.  He even did work for the Boy's Own Paper.  For thirty years, beginning in 1890, he worked as a professional illustrator at a time when journalism depended on the facile pens of many artists in a way which is no longer the case.  He also worked in watercolours, of which he had several exhibitions.

      He married Mary Cottenham ('Cottie') White in 1894, but they had no children.  In 1897 they moved away from London to live in rural Devon.  At this time he was a close friend of the poet John Masefield, who shared his delight in ships, pirates, and the sea.  In 1910 he returned to live in Ireland - he had never felt fully at home in England.  At first he and his wife lived in Wicklow, but later moved back into Dublin, where Yeats had a studio on fashionable Fitzwilliam Square, high up in an old Georgian mansion.

      He had travelled in the west of Ireland with John Synge, illustrating the playwright's articles for the Manchester Guardian with drawings of life in the west of Ireland.  He returned to these scenes in his book of 1912, actually called Life in the West of Ireland.  He began painting in oils, at first as a continuation of the close observational style of his earlier work, but over the years moved into a looser, more mythopoetic style.  This growth as an artist was much like that of his brother the poet, who moved from the lyrical to the great poems of his old age.  Jack Yeats was among the significant artists who exhibited at the influential show of international modern art held in 1913 at the New York Armoury.

      His imagination was much engaged by the troubles, and he was far more radical in his politics than his brother.  Jack painted several scenes of incidents in the troubles, such as Bachelor's Walk - In Memory and Communicating with the Prisoners, which have become icons of Irish history.  Though his poet brother supported the Free State and accepted office as a senator, Jack Yeats' sympathies were with the republicans, and images of heroic defeat which echo events in the civil war can be found in his later paintings.

      Living quietly in Dublin, he exhibited from time to time.  His painting, however, continued to mature and to become technically looser and more expressionist, with a vivid sense of colour while beginning to employ a personal symbolism drawn from the life he loved in the west.

      He was also a writer, but his plays and novels are largely of interest for what they reveal about the painter rather than for themselves, though all share the beguiling tenderness for past scenes that makes his work so attractive to many.  His inspiration, he once said, for both his paintings and writings was 'affection, wide, devious, and sometimes, handsome'.

      He was brought to the attention of the wider world by the critical writings of Sir Kenneth Clark, then the director of the National Gallery in London.  'Colour,' he wrote, 'is Yeats' element in which he dives and splashes with the shameless abandon of a porpoise.'  In 1945 a major exhibition of his works was held at the National Gallery, and another in Dublin.  From then he held regular, almost annual exhibitions in both cities.

      Jack Yeats' friend, the Irish poet Thomas MacGreevy, thought that the painter was the equal of Titian and Rembrandt: 'If universality of outlook and the last refinements of artistic technique were attainable for a religious painter in the little republic of Venice, and for a bourgeois painter in the little republic of Holland in the seventeenth century, why should they not be attainable for an artist of the life of the people in the little almost-republic of Ireland in the twentieth?  Universality of outlook and technical mastery of art are both a question of the capacity to understand, the capacity that is the second gift of the Holy Ghost, that was the one gift Solomon asked of the Lord.  I am of the opinion that the Lord bestowed the capacity to understand on Jack Yeats.'

      His work has often been compared with the poetry of his brother, but as an expression of the Irish imagination he had far more in common with JAMES JOYCE [25].  Both share an early realism, a mature and humane middle style based on city life, and a final late stage in which the words of Finnegans Wake, so complex in their symbolic allusiveness, parallel late paintings such as Men of Destiny.  Joyce even owned a Jack Yeats picture of the River Liffey.  Yet, oddly, despite the fame he achieved in his lifetime, his paintings remained at a price which enabled many to buy them from his exhibitions.

      Yeats died in Dublin in 1957, but since his death his reputation has grown continually, and his paintings now achieve astronomical prices which would have come as a great shock to such an essentially shy and retiring man.  His paintings have an intense literary quality, unusual for a twentieth-century artist, which makes them accessible to a wide audience.  They are a pageant of the spiritual odyssey of the Irish people over the last two centuries, the full depths of which are only now coming to be appreciated.  In time he will, indeed, be ranked with Titian and Rembrandt.