Jack Butler Yeats

Life
1871-1957; b. 23 Fitzroy Rd., London, 29 Aug.; youngest child of John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen; left permanently to be raised in Sligo from 1875 [aetat. 8], where the landscape ‘made [him] a painter’; ed. privately by Miss Blythe, and after in London at Westminster, South Kensington, and Chiswick art schools; habitually drew in childhood and was further inspired by seeing Buffalo Bill Cody and his circus, seen in London; supplied with small commissions by Sarah Purser; illustrated for magazines such as Vegetarian, Judy, Paddock Life, Boy’s Own Paper, schoolbooks and racing papers, in Manchester and later in Devon, 1890-1910; m. Mary Cottenham White ("Cottie"), a fellow-student at Chiswick, Aug. 1894; settling in Darmouth, 1897; first one-man exhibition, Clifford Gallery, Haymarket, London 1897, showing chiefly Devon paintings; frequent visits to Ireland, incl. Coole Park, and walking tours with J. M. Synge; issued monthly Broadsheet of verse and illustrations, first with Pamela Colman Smith, later with Mary Cottenham Yeats, all published by Elkin Mathews; prepared illustrations for Synge, Aran Islands (1907), following his ill. of Synge’s Congested Districts articles for Manchester Guardian, 1905; moved to America; several one-man shows at Clausen Gallery, New York in this period; returned to Ireland, 1910, living first at Greystones, then in Dublin; Life in the West of Ireland (1912), an illustrated book and title of a series of exhibitions including The Man from Aranmore and other works valorising the new Ireland, at one of which Patrick Pearse bought a painting; turned to oils; five works in Armory International Exhibition of Modern Art, NY, 1913, alongside with Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Duchamp, Picabia, &c; RHA 1915 [var. ARHA 1916, RHA 1917]: incensed by Lock-Out Strike, 1913; attended Pearse’s funeral oration at graveside of O’Donovan Rossa, Aug. 1914; involved in legal action surrounding Pollexfen estate; suffered nervous breakdown, 1915-16; and painted Bachelor’s Walk: In Memory, 1916, with other elegiac paintings including ‘Communicating with Prisoners’ and ‘Funeral of Harry Boland’; supported anti-Treaty side in Civil War, while living at Greystones; formed friendship with Kokoscha, who visited Ireland in 1928-29; issued Sligo (1930), fiction-memoir; also Sailing, Sailing Swiftly (1933), the title being a phrase from George Fox’s ‘County of Mayo’; published The Amaranthers (1936), another ‘novel’, reviewed appreciatively by Samuel Beckett; joint exhibition, with William Nicholson, organised by Kenneth Clark at the National Gallery (London), 1942; issued further fiction, Ah, Well (1942) and And To You Also (1944); National Loan Exhibition, Dublin 1945; issued The Careless Flower (1947), prose; post-war arrival of Victor Waddington relieved him of necessity of selling his own work; Tate Gallery exhibition, 1948; retrospective in principal American cities, 1951 [cf. BREF retrosp. at Temple Newsam, Leeds, Tate Galley, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Colorado, Toronto, Detroit, and New York, 1951/52]; devastated by the death of his wife; d. in Dublin, 28 March; nine experimental plays include The Silencer [n.d]; Apparitions; The Green Wave; The Old Sea Road, produced at the Abbey were, Harlequin Positions (Abbey Experimental Th., 1939); La La Noo (Abbey Experimental Th. 1942), and In Sand (Abbey Experimental Th., 1949), and Rattle [q.d.]; received honorary degrees from TCD, NUI, and Legion of Honour; worked on Loughrea Cathedral of St. Brendan with Sarah Purser and Harry Clarke for Gerald O’Donovan, while Cathedral adminstrator; in a letter to Joseph Hone, he wrote, ‘No one creates ... the artist assembles memories’ (7 March 1922); there is a portrait of Yeats by James Sleator in the Crawford Gallery, Cork. DIB DIW DIH DIL OCEL BREF OCIL

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Works
Prose, A Broadside (Dublin: Dun Emer & Cuala 1908-15); Modern Aspects of Irish Art (Cumann Leigheacht agus Phobail 1922); Sligo (London: Wishart 1930) Sailing Sailing Swiftly (London: Putnam 1933); Amaranthers (London: Heinemann 1936); The Charmed Life (London: Routledge 1938); Ah, Well: a Romance in Perpetuity (Routledge 1942); And To You Also (London: Routledge 1944) [these three titles rep. together (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974); 5+382pp; The Careless Flower (London: Pilot Press 1947); 249pp; note on ‘Walking Through Connemara with Him [JMS]’ in W. B. Yeats, Synge and the Ireland of His Times (Cuala Press 1911; facs. rep. 1970, 6+45pp);

Children’s Plays (for miniature theatre), James Flaunty, or The Terror of the Western Seas (Mathews 1901); The Scourge of the Gulph (Mathew 1903); The Treasure of the Garden (Mathews 1903); Little Fleet (Mathews 1909), also The Bosun and the Bob-Tailed Comet [a story] (Mathews 1904); [all printed as Jack’s Chap Books [1903-04];

Other Plays,The Silencer [n.d]; Apparitions (1933) [including Apparitions; The Old Sea Road; and Rattle];Ah, Well (1942) and And To You Also (1944) [issued together in paperback, Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1974)]; La La Noo (Dublin: Cuala 1943; rep. IUP 1971, 5+53); In Sand (Dolmen 1964); Collected Plays, ed. with introduction by Robin Skelton (London: Secker & Warburg 1971), 5+382pp.; Selected Writings, ed. and intro. by Robin Skelton (André Deutsch 1991) [contains prose extracts from Manchester Guardian, sundry pieces, 1905, 1906 & 1932.

Illustrations of Irish authors: 1] W. B. Yeats, Irish Fairy Tales (1892); 2] Aran Islands (1907; Blackstaff [facs. Maunsel 1911 ed.] 1988), xiv+256pp.; 12 ill. plates, ‘The Islandman’; ‘The Pier’; ‘The Hooker’s Owner’; ‘Kelp Making; ‘The Evictions’; ‘Carrying Seaweed for Kelp’ [female fig.]; ‘A Four-Oared Curagh’ [sic]; ‘“It’s real heavy she is, your honour”, he said, “I’m thinking it’s gold there will be in it”’ [porter seated on the quay]; ‘Thatching’; ‘An Island Horseman’. 3] George Birmingham, Irishmen All (1913), 10 ill plates, ‘The Country Gentleman’; ‘The Police Sargeant’; ‘The Squireen’; ‘The Politician’; ‘The Lesser Official’; ‘The Farmer’; ‘The Publican’; ‘The Exile from Erin’ [a gent. reading in a continental hotel]; ‘The Parish Priest’; ‘The Minister’; ‘A Country Shop Assistant’. 4] ill. William Carleton, The Black Prophet, introduced by D. J. O’Donoghue (London: Laurence & Bullen 1899). Also ills. for Frederick Langbridge, Dania Fitzmaurice (Askew 1901) [rep. of Dreams of Dania for Bowden, publ.]. Also, a Christmas card with a poem by Patrick Pearse (Cuala Press, 1914.)

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Robin Skelton, Celtic Contraries (Syracuse UP 1990) [272pp index], Chp. 5, ‘The Vision of Jack B. Yeats’, pp.105-33.

Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal: The Irish Revolution in Literature from Parnell to the Death of Yeats (1977), pp.277-80.

Hilary Pyle, review of Jack B. Yeats, Modern Painters: Quarterly Journal of the Fine Arts, 4, 2 (Summer 1991), pp.90-91.

Jeanne Sheehy, review of Bruce Arnold, Jack Yeats (Yale UP 1998), 418pp., in Times Literary Supplement (20 Nov. 1998), p.19.

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Notes
Publisher’s notices included in list appended to pop. edn. of St. John Ervine, Mrs. Martin’s Man, 1915 [prev. 1914]), viz., Life in the West of Ireland, drawn and painted by Jack B. Yeats, large 8vo., cloth, gilt, 5/- net; baords, 2/6 net., sepcial edn. with original Sketch on fly leaf, limited to 150 signed copies, 21/-; with notices: ‘Mr Yeats is one of the happiest interpreters of contemporary Ireland. He is at once imaginative and fanciful, humorous and realistic. Like synge, he loves wildness and he loves actuality. … His colour … seems to us to communicate the wonder and joy of the Ireland of our own times with a richness denied to any other artist. … We have here a very treasury of humorous and grotesque aspects of the life - not the domestic life, but the open air and holiday life - of the people of the West of Ireland. (Daily News and Leader). ‘One of the most Irish of Irish books we have come across for years. … all the familiar sights in rural Ireland drawn by an artist who has an eye for humour and character not surpassed, if it is indeed equalled, by any other artist living in these islands. (The Irish Homestead).

Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (1979), entry on Jack B. Yeats by Nora [A.] McGuinness: Ireland foremost modern painter; he wrote his own epitaph, ‘I have travelled all my life without a ticket / ..When we are asked about it all in the end, / we who travel without tickets, we can say / with that vanity which takes the place of / self-confidence, even though we went without/tickets we never were commuters’ (printed in Terence de Vere White, A Fretful Midge). Note additional indexed references to other entries, viz, contributed to the Bell; contributed three drawings to each number of A Broadside (1908-1915), issued by the Cuala Press, with eighty-four numbers [later series in 1935, and 1937, each twelve parts, were illustrated by several other artists]. Jack B Yeats’s Cuala Press designs reprinted in 1969 reorganisation under Liam Miller; illustrated numbers of The Dublin Magazine (1923-58); his friend John Masefield arranged a commission from the Manchester Guardian for Synge and Jack Yeats to do a series of articles on the Congested Districts, in 1905.

Robin Skelton, Celtic Contraries (Syracuse 1990), cites paintings: The Dwarfs of the Circus (1912); The Scene Painters Rose (1927); Helen (1937); The Blood of Abel (1942), a Tinkers’ encampment; The Two Travellers (1942); Grief (1951); Glory (1953), in which Rosenthal sees ‘youth, maturity, and old age all talking and rejoicing in the glory of life’; also plays: The Deathly Terrace [n.d.]; Apparitions; The Old Sea Road; and Rattle [all published under general title of Apparitions, 1933]; Harlequin’s Positions; The Silencer; La La Noo; The Green Wave, intended as a preface for In Sand [the picture is printed as no. 4 in the Cuala Press Broadsides for 1937]; In Sand [Anthony Larcson’s bequest, probably inspired by Walter Savage Landor’s poem containing the lines, ‘The soft sea-sand ... O! what a child!/You think you’re writing upon stone!’; all the foregoing printed in Collected Plays.

University of Ulster Library holds Ah[,] Well; And To You Also (1974); The Charmed Life (1974); Collected Plays (1971); G. Birmingham, Irishmen All (1913); Synge, Aran Islands (1904); The Careless Flower (1947); Selected Writings (1991); W. B. Yeats, Synge and the Ireland of His Times ([1911; fac. 1970]); Arnolfini Catalogue Of Late Paintings (1991); Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats (1971, 1988); Pyle, Jack B Yeats In The National Gallery Of Ireland (1986); Thomas McGreevy, Jack B Yeats [JORD]; Roger McHugh, ed. Jack B Yeats, A Centenary Gathering, Samuel Beckett, et al. (1971); La La Noo (1971).

Portraits: Full-length self-portrait, in studio, c.1920 [National Gallery of Ireland] [see Brian De Breffny, ed., Cultural Encyc. of Ireland, 1983, p.251.) (.); shows a head & shoulders drawing by Seán O’Sullivan (Encyclopaedia of Ireland, 1968 fig. 410, p.336); see also childhood portrait by John Butler Yeats, and self-portrait in chalk [NGI]; oil portrait by John B Yeats [National Gallery of Ireland], and portrait in oil by Estelle Solomons, 1922, purchased Sligo Museum in 1962, See Hilary Pyle, Estella Solomons: Patriot Portraits (1966).

La La Noo, performed 1942, seven women, in a pub are talking about death (‘I would hate to see any man die ..’). They are drenched when the go to the bus, and return. After their clothes are dry, the Stranger offer to drive them to the bus, but he crashes the lorry and dies. The Landlord is left with the body. [Skelton, though it seems at first sight to be a presentation of the theme that death lies in wait for all ... it is a portrait of a questioning, fearful, speculative mankind.’]. In Sand, Anthony Larcson dies with a last wish to be commemorated by a young girl writing in sand, ‘Tony, we have good thought for you still’; she does so far and wide; the island, under the influence of its Governor and a Visitor, is planning to become a republic, but the declaration is deferred during the tourist season. Meanwhile, a young couple are writing Larcson’s mesage in the sand, knowing only that it is good luck to do so. Yeats seems to argue against politic fanaticism, ‘Larcson’s joke has worked; he has managed by means of his words to prevent the island losing its innocence and turning into the ruthless modern society he disliked and accused’ (Skelton, op. cit., 1990, p.133.)

Samuel Beckett reviewed Jack Yeats’s novel The Amaranthers in an unsolicited article published in the Dublin Magazine, during the composition of Murphy. He praised the directness of expression (‘The artist takes things to pieces and makes new things’) and noted that Yeats avoids forcing an impression of Ireland on his material: ‘The Island is not throttled into Ireland ... nor the City into Dublin, notwithstanding "one immigrant, in his cups, recited a long narrative poem".’ [See John Harrington, The Irish Beckett, Syracuse UP 1991, p. 40.] Further, Beckett wrote: ‘The national aspects of Mr Yeats’s genius have, I think, been over-stated, and for motives not always remarkable for their aesthetic purity.’ Instead, Beckett talks about, ‘the issueless predicament of existence ... these [Yeats’s] are characteristic notations having reference, I imagine, to processes less simple, and less delicious, than those to which the plastic vis is commonly reduced, and to a world where Tir-na-nOgue makes no more sense than Bachelor’s Walk, nor Helen than the apple-woman, nor asses than men, nor Abel’s blood than Useful’s, nor morning than night, nor inward than the outward search.’ [Disjecta, 1984, 96-97]. Note that Derek Mahon quotes Beckett on Jack Yeats’s paintings as ‘high solitary art uniquely self-pervaded, one with its wellhead in a hiddenmost of spirit, not be be clarified by any other light.’ (Journalism: Selected Prose 1970-1995, Gallery Press 1996, p.52.

Thomas MacGreevy, in Jack B. Yeats (1945) wrote a book about the national importance of Jack Yeats that Beckett found difficult to praise, but, out of obligation, tried to do so [acc. John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse 1991) [See also under MacGreevy]. Note also, MacGreevy wrote in the Irish Times (4 Aug 1945) that Yeats was ‘the painter who in his work was the consummate expression of the spirit of his own nation at one of the supreme points of its evolution’ Beckett’s review of MacGreevy’s book demurs, ‘to some also it may seem that Mr. Yeats’s importance is to be sought elsewhere than in a sympathetic treatment (how sympathetic?) of the local accident, or the local substance.’ In Les Lettres Nouvelles (April 1954), Beckett wrote an appreciation of Yeats for the Paris exhibition of his work, and later translated it for James White’s catalogue of the paintings, ‘Strangeness so entire as even to withstand the stock assimilation to holy patrimony, national and other ... what less celt than this incomparable hand shaken by the aim it sets itself or by its own urgency? ... Gloss? In images of such breathless immediacy as these there is no occaison, no time given, no room left, for the lenitive of comment. None in this impetus of need that scatters them loose to the beyonds in vision. None in this great inner real where phantoms quick and dead, nature and void, all tha ever that never will be, join in a single evidence for a single testimony. None in this final master which submits in trembling to the unmasterable.’ [Disjecta, Misc. Writings, 1983, p.97; all cited by Francis Doherty, ‘Watt in an Irish Frame’, Irish University Review, Autumn 1990, pp.187-203; p.200.]

Emblems: details of Jack Yeats's paintings have been used to illustrate numerous book covers including works by James Joyce (Penguin Dubliners), Flann O’Brien (Penguin At-Swim-Two-Birds), historical novels by Eilis Dillon and Terence Brown’s Ireland: A Social and Cultural history (1979), and even the Dublin telephone book (1991).

Fox's poem: The title of Yeats's novel Sailing, Sailing Swiftly (1933) is a phrase from George Fox’s ‘County of Mayo’ whose authorship was professed by Samuel Ferguson.

Banners: One of the banners designed by Jack B. Yeats and his wife and embroiderd by Dun Emer Guild, showing St Colum Cille (Columba) writing, his bookmark in the form of a Celtic cross, is ill. in BREF, 143, with an entry on Loughrea Cathedral.

C. Palles: Ernest Rhys, The Great Cockney Tragedy (1891); note port. of Christopher Palles, chalk, by Jack B. Yeats; Anne Crookshank, Irish Portraits Exhibition (Belfast: Ulster Museum 1965).

Sale price (1) ‘The Minister’, Jack B. Yeats’ oil painting [sic], used to illustrate Irishmen All by George Birmingham, was expected to make £35,000 stg. at Christie's of London [auction house] in March (Irish Times, 1 Feb 1992.) Also, "Come on the Dawn" by Jack Butler Yeats, auctioned at Sothebys 18 May 2001, made £157,500.

Sale price (2) A Jack Yeats picture, “The Coachman”, part of his Irish circus series, purchased for less than £10 by one Emelia Otto on a short trip to Sligo, was spotted at an auction notice by Sean Crean of Celtic Arts, Long Island, and purchased in Stewartsville, Pennsylvania, for $160,000, a fraction of its real value estimated at €1.5 million. Crean, a native of Roscommon, was assisted with the purchase by another Roscommonman. (Report in Sunday Times, 28 April 2002.)

Sale price (3): “The Nimrod of the Railway Line” sold at Christie’s auction in August 2003 for £251,650 [E350,800], equalling the price fetched by a canvas of Sir John Lavery on the same occasion. (See Irish Times, 17Aug. 2003.)

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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)