Jack B. Yeats

Biography

Jack Yeats held his first solo exhibition in 1898 and called it “Sketches of Life in the West of Ireland”. The title is more accurate than many later pronouncements about him: oil painting was still some years away, and the west of Ireland he had known since childhood.

He was born on 29 August 1871 in London, the youngest son of the Irish portrait painter John Butler Yeats. His elder brother was the poet William Butler Yeats, later a Nobel laureate in literature (1923). Jack spent his childhood and early youth in Sligo, in the house of his maternal grandparents. There he saw travelling circuses, town festivals and sporting contests, and found his grandmother painting watercolours; these impressions came back in his pictures later. In 1887 he returned to his parents in London. He studied at the Chiswick School of Art, then at the Westminster School of Art, where his teacher was Fred Brown. More is known about Chiswick: there he learned freehand drawing, perspective, pottery painting and designs for wallpaper, furniture and stained glass. While still a student he published drawings in the magazines “Vegetarian”, “Ariel” and “Paddock Life”.

He went on to work as a graphic artist, illustrator and watercolourist. He drew for “Boy’s Own Paper” and “Judy”, made comic strips for “Comic Cuts”, among them a Sherlock Holmes parody, “Chubb-Lock Homes”, and wrote articles for “Punch” under the pseudonym “W. Bird”. In August 1894 he married Mary Cottenham White, a fellow student. Around 1910 he settled in Ireland, in Greystones, County Wicklow, and in 1917 moved to Dublin. He took an interest in oil paint around 1897, but did not paint seriously in it until after 1905; until then watercolour remained his main medium. His early pictures are lyrical landscapes and figures of the west of Ireland, with a noticeable influence of Romanticism. From 1899 he exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy, the Dublin academy of art, to which he was elected in 1916. In 1913 his “The Circus Dwarf” (1912) was shown in New York at the Armory Show, an international exhibition of modern art.

After 1920 his manner changed sharply. Yeats sympathised with the Irish republican movement but took no part in politics. He painted town and country life in Ireland, horses, the circus, travelling players, races, the harsh shores of the west, scenes from Celtic mythology. His palette grew lighter and his brushwork dense: he laid paint on in thick layers and often gave up the brush and worked in other ways. His paintings have poetic, open-ended titles. He took no pupils and, by report, let no one watch him at work, so the process remains largely unclear to us.

In 1924 his painting “The Liffey Swim” won a silver medal in the art competition of the Paris Olympics (in the official lists it appears simply as “Swimming”). It was the first Olympic medal for Ireland after the founding of the Irish Free State.

Yeats also wrote. He produced novels, among them “Sligo” (1930), “The Amaranthers” (1936), “The Charmed Life” (1938) and “Ah Well” (1942), and plays; three of his plays were staged at the Abbey Theatre, for which he also designed sets. Samuel Beckett was a close friend and thought highly of “The Amaranthers”. In 1939 Yeats was elected to the board of the National Gallery of Ireland. In 1943 Victor Waddington became his sole art dealer. Retrospectives were held at the National Gallery in London (1942), in Dublin (1945) and at the Tate Gallery (1948). After his wife’s death in 1947 his painting became more metaphysical and nostalgic.

He worked until his last years and died in Dublin on 28 March 1957. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery. His last works were shown at Waddington Galleries in London in 1958, and an exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland in 1971 restored his reputation as, perhaps, the most important Irish painter of the twentieth century.