Jack B. Yeats

Jack Butler Yeats, photo by Alice Boughton

John "Jack" Butler Yeats (29 August 1871 – 28 March 1957) was an Irish artist and Olympic medalist. William was his brother.

His early style was that of an illustrator; he only began to work regularly in oils in 1906. His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland—especially of his boyhood home of Sligo. Yeats's work contain elements of Romanticism.

Life

Yeats was born in London, England. He was the youngest son of Irish portraitist John Butler Yeats, and the brother of W. B. Yeats, who received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. He grew up in Sligo with his maternal grandparents, before returning to his parents' home in London in 1887. Early in his career he worked as an illustrator for magazines like the Boy's Own Paper and Judy, drew comic strips, including the Sherlock Holmes parody "Chubb-Lock Homes" for Comic Cuts, and wrote articles for Punch under the pseudonym "W. Bird". In 1894 he married Mary Cottenham, also a native of England and two years his senior, and resided in Wicklow according to the Census of Ireland, 1911.

From around 1920, he developed into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism. He was sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause, but not politically active. However, he believed that 'a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints', and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helped articulate a modern Dublin of the 20th century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man. When he died, Samuel Beckett wrote that "Yeats is the great of our time...he brings light as only the great dare to bring light to the issueless predicament of existence."

His favourite subjects included the Irish landscape, horses, circus and travelling players. His early paintings and drawings are distinguished by an energetic simplicity of line and colour, his later paintings by an extremely vigorous and experimental treatment of often thickly applied paint. He frequently abandoned the brush altogether, applying paint in a variety of different ways, and was deeply interested in the expressive power of colour. Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the 20th century (and the first to sell for over £1m), he took no pupils and allowed no one to watch him work, so he remains a unique figure. The artist closest to him in style is his friend, the Austrian painter, Oskar Kokoschka.

Besides painting, Yeats had a significant interest in theatre and in literature. He was a close friend of Samuel Beckett and of J. M. Synge, providing illustrations for two of Synge's travel books, The Aran Islands and Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara. He designed sets for the Abbey Theatre, and three of his own plays were also produced there. He wrote novels in a stream of consciousness style that Joyce acknowledged, and also many essays. His literary works include The Careless Flower, The Amaranthers (much admired by Beckett), and The Charmed Life. Yeats's paintings usually bear poetic and evocative titles. Indeed, his father recognized that Jack was a far better painter than he, and also believed that 'some day I will be remembered as the father of a great poet, and the poet is Jack'. He was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916. He died in Dublin in 1957, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.

Unusually, Yeats holds the distinction of being Ireland's first medalist at the Olympic Games in the wake of creation of the Irish Free State. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Yeats' painting The Liffey Swim won a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games. In the competition records the painting is simply entitled Swimming.

Works

In November 2010, one of Yeats's works, A Horseman Enters a Town at Night, painted in 1948 and previously owned by novelist Graham Greene, sold for nearly £350,000 at a Christie's auction in London. A smaller work, Man in a Room Thinking, painted in 1947, sold for £66,000 at the same auction. In 1999 the painting, The Wild Ones, had sold at Sotheby's in London for over £1.2m, the highest price yet paid for a Yeats painting.

Work in Collections

• The National Gallery, Dublin
• The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
• Crawford Art Gallery, Cork
• Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
• The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD
• Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo

References

• Samuel Beckett. 1991. Jack B. Yeats: The Late Paintings (Whitechapel Art Gallery)
• John Booth. 1993. Jack B. Yeats: A Vision of Ireland (House of Lochar)
• John W. Purser. 1991. The Literary Universe of Jack B. Yeats (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers)
• Hilary Pyle. 1987. Jack B. Yeats in the National Gallery of Ireland (National Gallery of Ireland)
• Hilary Pyle. 1989. Jack B. Yeats: A Biography (Carlton Books)
• T.G. Rosenthal. 1993. The Art of Jack B. Yeats (Carlton Books)
• Jack B. Yeats. 1992. Selected Writings of Jack B. Yeats (Carlton Books)
• Declan J Foley (2009), ed. with an introduction by Bruce Stewart,The Only Art of Jack B. Yeats Letters and essays (Lilliput Press Dublin).

External links

• Cuala Press Broadside Collection, illustrated by Jack B. Yeats is located at the Special Collections/Digital Library in Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University.
• The Only Art: Letters of JBY
• The Fourth John Butler Yeats Seminar, at the Swift Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin 10–12 September 2010 details