Jack B Yeats
Summary (1871-1957) Jack B Yeats is arguably Ireland's most famous painter, and he loved his country with a rare passion, one that shines through his paintings. It was the everyday life of Ireland which fired his imagination - fairs, circuses, race meetings, sailors and farmers, tramps and beggars, trams and city streets - and in all his work he expressed and intense sympathy for the individual, the underdog, the outsider. Particularly he drew upon the memories of his boyhood, spent in Sligo on the remote west coast of Ireland.
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Biography
1871 - 1957) artist Born 29th Aug 1871, 23 Fitzroy Road, London Youngest of five children of John Butler Yeats. At eight he went to live in Sligo with his grandparents, and his boyhood there awakened his lifelong delight in country scenes, travelling people, circuses, and seafarers.
His exiguous formal education was received at a private school run by the Misses Blythe. He returned to London at seventeen and studied at the Westminster, South Kensington and Chiswick schools of art.
Between 1890 and 1910 he worked as a professional illustrator, contributing to the Vegetarian, Judy, Paddock Life, Boys Own Paper, and other periodicals, as well as schoolbooks and racing papers.
In 1894 he married Mary Cottenham White, a fellow-student, and in 1897 they settled in Devon. They visited Ireland frequently, staying with Lady Gregory at Coole, and Yeats went on a walking tour in the west of Ireland with J M Synge. At this period he held a number of one-man shows of drawings and watercolours at the Clausen Galleries, New York. Despite his long residence there he felt England to be an alien country, and in 1910 he returned to live in Ireland for the rest of his life, settling first at Greystones, County Wicklow, then in Dublin.
He illustrated a large number of broadsheets and in 1912 published a book of paintings and drawings, Life in the West of Ireland. About this time he turned to painting in oils and had five works shown in the Armory International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York in 1913. Elected RHA 1915. The 1916 Rising and the subsequent struggle for independence inspired some of his best-known paintings, the elegiac Bachelor’s Walk, In Memory, Communicating with Prisoners, and Funeral of Harry Boland.
His reputation grew steadily in the thirties. In 1942 he had a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery, London, and in 1945 a loan exhibition of almost a hundred pictures was held in the National College of Art, Dublin. A loan exhibition was held in the Tate Gallery, London, in 1948, and a first retrospective American exhibition was held in the principal cities of the United States in 1951. His use of vivid and vital colour, which he began in the late twenties, shows its full development in his later work. Sir Kenneth Clark said: Colour is Yeats element, in which he dives and splashes with shameless abandon .He wrote a number of prose works. Some, like Sligo (1930) and Sailing, Sailing Swiftly (1933), were reminiscences, with little consecutive narrative thread; others were leisurely novels, like The Amaranthers (1936).
His plays La La Noo (1942) and In Sand (Abbey Experimental Theatre, 1949) reflect, like his books, his own view of his inspiration He received many honours, principally honorary degrees from the University of Dublin and NUI and the Legion of Honour. Died in Dublin, 28 March 1957.
