John "Jack" Butler Yeats (29 August 1871 – 28 March 1957) was an Irish artist. His early style was that of an illustrator; he only began to work regularly in oils in 1906.[1] His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland—especially of his boyhood home of Sligo. His brother is William B Yeats. Yeats' works contain elements of Romanticism, and are grounded in fine observation and brilliant draughtsmanship.
Life
Yeats was born in London. He was the youngest son of Irish portraitist John Butler Yeats, and the brother of the Nobel Prize winning poet William Butler Yeats.
In 1894, Butler Yeats married Mary Cottenham, also a native of England and two years his senior, and resided in Wicklow on the 1911 Census of Ireland.
Beginning around 1920, Yeats 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 twentieth 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."[2]
Yeats won a medal at the 1924 Tailteann Games in painting.[3]
His favourite subjects include 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 twentieth century (and the first to sell for over £1 m), 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 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'. Yeats was married to the painter Mary Cottenham White ('Cottie') in 1894 and elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916.[4] He died in Dublin.
Notes
- ^ Pyle, 106
- ^ Brennan, Séamus. "The Work of Jack B. Yeats". Speech at the National Gallery of Ireland, 17th July, 2007. Retrieved on 1 July, 2009.
- ^ Mike, Cronin. "The State on Display: The 1924 Tailteann Art Competition". New Hibernia Review. Volume 9, Number 3, Autumn 2005. 50-71
- ^ W. J. Gillan & McCormack, Patrick. The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture. WileyBlackwell, 2001. 624. ISBN 0-6312-2817-9
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
[1] The Only Art: Letters of JBY
The Fourth John Butler Yeats Seminar will be held at The Swift Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin September 10-12, 2010 details [2]
