Jack Butler Yeats, (Irish, 1871 to 1957)
Jack B. Yeats, described by T. G. Rosenthal as “Ireland’s greatest visual artist (The Art of Jack B. Yeats, London, 1993, page 1), was born in 1871, the son of John Butler Yeats (1839 to 1922), painter, illustrator, and in later life the drinking companion of the Ashcan School painter John Sloan and the American collector John Quinn. Jack Yeats’ older brother was the poet, William Butler Yeats (1865 to 1939), and Jack counted among his life long friends the Irish writers James Joyce, John Synge and Samuel Becket.
Trained as an artist-reporter, Jack Yeats set out early in his career to document the people and places of western Ireland, most notably in County Sligo, where he had grown up under the care of his grandparents. In the 1930s, after two decades away from County Sligo, Yeats returned to the landscape of his childhood. By this time he had moved from an earlier realist style towards highly expressionist and often intensely colored images of national life and character. Although Yeats had developed his style independently of any direct outside influence, by the mid-1940s, during his most prolific period, his work often resembles that of such expressionist painters as Oskar Kokoschka in Austria, William de Kooning in the United States, Chaim Soutine in France and Karel Appel in Holland.
Yeats believed that the heights of creativity were achieved through a combination of observation and memory. Experiences from childhood proved particularly powerful stimulants to imagination, and, like all childhood memories, they tended to combine facts, emotional symbols, and magical associations. As Yeats’ father once wrote him, “a man of genius should be like a growing boy, who is never, never, and never will be a grown up.”
In her biography of the artist, Hilary Pyle writes that in Yeats’ later paintings, such as The Mountain Path, the artist relies on more than childhood imaginings. Instead, “emotion itself, rather than event, [now] becomes the subject. [These] are works, she adds, “of immediacy and drama, [and] of a deeply personal nature with a very far reaching significance (Jack B. Yeats: A biography, revised edition, London, 1989, page 133).
Information courtesy of Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers, October 2003.