1839-1922; b. at Tullylish, Co. Down, son of Church of Ireland rector [see genealogy]; ed. Atholl Academy, Isle of Man, under a brutal Scottish headmaster, with Charles and George Pollexfen; then at TCD, 1857; friendship with Edward Dowden and his br. John (later bishop of Edinburgh), and John Todhunter; auditor of Law Students’ Debating Soc.; Irish Bar, 1866, and briefly devilled for Isaac Butt, from whom he acquired his Home Rule sympathies, but did not practice long; m. Susan Mary Pollexfen, 1863; moved to London, 1867 - though warned by an aunt ‘here you are somebody, there you will be nobody at all’; leased 23 Fitzroy Rd., Regent’s Park (6 yr.), London; enrolled at Heatherley’s Art School and later at the Slade, forming friendships with John Trivett Nettleship and Edwin J. Ellis, all admirers of the pre-Raphaelites; spent summer holidays in Sligo, 1868-69, and 1870-71; returned family to Sligo July 1872; moved to 14 Edith Villas (Kensington); suffered death of dg. Jane, 1876; moved to 8 Woodstock Rd., Bedford Park, 1879; spent two-and-a-half years in Howth, where the family occupied Balscadden Cottage, and another address in succession; briefly lived in cramped home at Terenure, moving to London in April 1887; resettled at 58 Eardley Crescent, Earls Court, Aug. 1887, and then quickly onwards to 3 Blenheim Rd., Bedford Park, March 1888-Oct. 1902; Susan Yeats’s first stroke, Dec. 1887; Yeats continually moved his family between Dublin, London, and Howth in the 1870s and 1880s; abandoned oil or pencil sketches, 1890; resumed oil painting, 1897; Mrs. Yeats died in 1900; Yeats platonic relationship of ten years standing with Rosa Butt (dg. of Isaac) now blossomed; assisted to return to Dublin by John Quinn, and settled in Dublin with his daughters Susan (Lily) and Elizabeth (Lolly); held joint exhibition with Nathaniel Hone, 1901; maintained a hospitable studio on St. Stephen’s Green; commissioned by Sir Hugh Lane to paint series of portraits of leading figures of Irish literary revival (incl. Synge, George Moore, Lady Gregory, and Susan Mitchell), now in NGI; wrote to United Irishman, calling the outcry against Synge’s Playboy ‘dishonest’ and asserting that the real objection was to his attaack on ‘loveless marriages’ in Ireland (31 October, 1903); participated in public meeting of 4 Feb. 1907, following Playboy riot; exhibition arranged by Sarah Purser; accompanied Lily to New York, 1908; there made friends including lawyer John Quinn and Isadora Duncan, and settles in the boarding house of the Normandy Petipas sisters on West 19th St.; Quinn became his patron in regard to an never-ending portrait of himself, and bought manuscripts from his W. B. Yeats, the money going to the painter’s upkeep; wrote essays and reviews, and brilliant letters (many unpublished) to his children and others; contributed 15-page letter to defence of Ulysses; in a last letter, to Lily, he insisted his belief that money was unimportant had borne fruit in the character of his son and professed ‘I am content’ (1 Feb. 1922); d. 3 Feb., after brief illness caused by long walk in the cold; bur. in Chesterton, a village in the Adirondacks. DIB DIH OCEL
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Works
Ezra Pound, ed., Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats
(Dublin: Cuala Press 1917), 60pp. [400 copies]; Essays
Irish and American (Dublin: Talbot Press; London: T. Fisher Unwin 1918), 95pp. [infra]; Lennox Robinson, ed., Further Letters
of John Butler Yeats (Dundrum: Cuala Press 1920) [400 copies]; Early Memories: Some Chapters of
Autobiography (Dundrum: Cuala Press 1923), 99pp.; Joseph Hone
[& O. Elton], ed., J. B. Yeats, Letters to his Son W. B. Yeats
and Others, 1869-1940 [‘Memoir of John Butler Yeats’ by
Hone; pref. by Oliver Elton (London: Faber 1944), 294pp. [err. 1941];
Do., (NY: Dutton 1946) [with slight variant contents]; and Do.
[reiss.] (London: Secker & Warburg 1983), and Do., [abridged] intro.
John McGahern (London: Faber 1999); G. O’Malley and Donald Torchiana,
eds., ‘John Butler Yeats to Lady Gregory: New Letters’, in Robin
Skelton and David R. Clark, eds., Irish Renaissance: A Gathering of
Essays, Memoirs, and Letters from the Massachusetts Review [prev.
‘Irish Gathering’] (Dublin: Dolmen 1965), pp.56-64; William
M. Murphy ed., Letters from Bedford Park: A Selection from the Correspondence
(1890-1901) of John Butler Yeats (Dublin: Cuala Press [Dolmen]
1972), xii, 77pp.
John McGahern, intro. Letters of John Butler Yeats [abridged edn. of Joseph Hone 1944] (London: Secker & Warburg 1983; Faber & Faber 1999). CONTENTS: List of Illustrations, p.vii; Introduction of John McGahern, 1-24; Notes by McGahern, 25-28; Index of Recipients of the Letters, 29; The Letters, 35; Index. 211. Ills. ’Yeats as a Child’, pencil, c.1874; J. B Yeats, self-portrait, c.1875; William Morris at the Contemporary Club’, pencil, April 1886 [NGI]; John O’Leary at the Contemporary Club Pencil, c.1894 [NGI]; W. B. Yeats as a Young Man, pen. Jan. 1886; Portait of Lolly Yeats, pencil, Oct. 6th 1898; John Millington Synge, Pencil, April 1905; George Hyde-Lees, Feb. 1920. (See extracts, infra.)
Bibliographical details
Essays Irish and American (Dublin: Talbot Press; London: T. Fisher Unwin 1918), 95pp. CONTENTS: Recollections of Samuel Butler; Back to the HOme; Why the Englishman is Happy; Synge and the Irish; The Modern Woman; Watts and the Method of Art.
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Criticism
Thomas Bodkin, ‘John Butler Yeats’, in Dublin Magazine,
I (Jan 1924).
William M Murphy, ‘Father and son, The Early Education of W. B. Yeats’, in Review of English Literature, 8.4 (Oct. 1967).
A. N. Jeffares, ‘John Butler Yeats, Anglo-Irishman’, in The Circus Animals, ed. Jeffares (1970).
Douglas Archibald, John Butler Yeats [Irish Writers Series] (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP 1974).
William M Murphy, Prodigal Father, the Life of John Butler Yeats (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP 1978).
A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats, A New Life (London: Hutchinson 1988).
James White, ed., Drawing and Paintings, (1971), 159pp.
James White, John Butler Yeats and the Irish Renaissance, with Pictures from the Collection of Michael Butler Yeats and from the National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin: Dolmen 1972), 72pp., including the poem “The Painter” - John Butler Yeats by Padraic Colum [from Irish Elegies, also publ. by Dolmen].
B. L. Reid, The Man from NY: John Quinn and His Friends (1968).
William Murphy, Family Secrets, William Butler Yeats and his Relatives (1995), 464pp.
John McGahern, introduction to Letters of J. B. Yeats [abridged edn.] (London: Faber 1999).
Janis Londraville, ed., Prodigal Father Revisited: Artists and Writers in the World of John Butler Yeats [Papers of a conference at Chestertown ,NY, on 7-9 Sept. 2001] (NY: Locust Hill Press 2002).
See also remarks on Dublin paintings of J. B. Yeats in the National Gallery of Ireland in Stanislaus Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, Vol. 2, ed. Richard Ellmann, Faber 1966, p.116 [under Walter Osborne]
W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies [q.p.]), (ibid., pp.16, 463.
W. B. Yeats, On the Boiler, Cuala Press 1941, pp.14-15; cited in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 1948, p.278.
W. B. Yeats, Letters to his Son, 1944, p.214.
Frank Tuohy, Yeats (1976), p.134.
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London: Faber [1948; rev. 1960]; ‘Chap. II, Fathers and Sons.
Maurice Harmon, reviewing William Murphy, Family Secrets, William Butler Yeats and his Relatives (1995), Books Ireland, (Sept 1995), p.201.
John McGahern, Introduction to Letters of J. B. Yeats [abridged edn.] (London: Faber 1999).
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Notes
University of Ulster (Morris Collection) holds Letters from Bedford
Park ... 1890-1901 (Dublin: Cuala Press 1972). BELF, John Butler Yeats,
Early Memories (Dundrum: Cuala Press 1923), 99pp; J.B. Yeats, Letters
to His Son W. B. Yeats and others 1869-1922 [1944] 294pp; Passages from
his letters, selected by Ezra Pound (Cuala P. 1917), 60p. [limited ed.
400 copies.]
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)