Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
The Boat (1948)
Oil on board 23.5 x 36.2cm (9 x 14")
Signed

 

Provenance:  Private Collection, London; With Theo Waddington London from whom purchased; private...

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
The Boat (1948)
Oil on board 23.5 x 36.2cm (9 x 14")
Signed

 

Provenance:  Private Collection, London; With Theo Waddington London from whom purchased; private Collection Dublin.

Literature: Hilary Pyle, A Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings, Andre Deutsch 1992, Catalogue no. 962

This is a fine example of late Jack B Yeats: spontaneous, vivid, intensely chromatic, allegorical in a personal, ambiguous way and hinging on a moment of drama. The drama here involves the conspicuously booted, elongated figure who dominates the greater portion of the composition to the right of the golden section. He appears to be rushing headlong away from the viewer, about to burst from the trees on the high ground into the sunlight, apparently in a bid to reach a boat visible at the shore below on the left, by a wooden pier but, we presume, about to depart. 

        

The late John Berger, who visited Yeats in Dublin in 1956 to interview him, wrote that his late paintings can appear “over-spontaneous, until one has watched the west coast of Ireland.” There, the landscape, Berger explains, is not so much a view as “a fast series of events (and) the sky is all action.” The landscape, in late Yeats, though firmly rooted in the west, is to some degree abstracted, a grand symbolic domain against which his protagonists, often isolated figures, confront existential questions.

        

Here, the figure is clearly keen to board the boat; to escape, perhaps, or to reach some desirable destination. In another painting from the same year, The Child of the Sea, two figures are viewed against a glowing expanse of ocean, the child of the title gazes awestruck out over the water - life and all its possibilities - but, beside him, a seasoned mariner has turned his back on the waves, as though he has had more than enough.

        

1948 was an important year for Yeats. He was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at London’s Tate Gallery. But his wife Cottie had died the previous year and he was increasingly aware of ageing, loss and mortality. Quite often, his later paintings, while drawing freely on memory, display a keen, elegiac longing for life and vitality. That sense of vitality, an appetite for life, is fully evident here.

 

Aidan Dunne, February 2022

 

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