Jack B. Yeats, R.H.A.

Victor Waddington Galleries, London, where purchased by James S. Plaut, Boston, February 1950;
Sotheby's London, 4th July 2001, lot 194

Boston, Massachussetts, Institute of Contemporary Art, Jack B. Yeats, A First Retrospective Exhibition, 1951, number untraced, with tour to Washington, Phillips Gallery, San Francisco, De Young Memorial Museum, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Centre, Toronto Art Gallery, Detroit Institute of Arts, New York National Academy.

Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, André Deutsch, London 1992, no. 983, p. 888, illustrated.

The board is sound. The paint surface is stable and in good overall condition with strong areas of impasto throughout. Ready to hang, a fine example. Under ultraviolet light this painting has security markings which fluoresce. Held in a gilt painted wood frame.
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Painted in 1949, Victor Waddington sold the present work directly to James S. Plaut of Boston the following year, who was Director of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. Plaut's interest in Yeats went well beyond adding to his personal collection - he spent the majority of 1950 curating the major touring American retrospective, one of the very few solo exhibitions ever held outside of Jack's London and Dublin shows, in which the present work was included. The most ambitious of all Jack's touring exhibitions, and unparalleled in travelling for a full year in the USA and Canada during 1951-2, the First Retrospective Exhibition was both selective and important. Bruce Arnold comments that in its intention to establish Yeats (within his lifetime) as a truly international artist, the First Retrospective Exhibition was a pivotal show. The idea had probably initially been suggested to Plaut by Oscar Kokoschka, who had his own exhibition at the Institute in 1948. However, the practical impact of the touring show was hampered by Yeats' refusal to allow reproduction of any of the images in the catalogue. Thus the great care and preparation which went into the show was somewhat dissipated and its significance diluted - an end result not in any way due to the quality of paintings on view. Yeats's reasoning was that "it is the best for all of us, including the American people, to realise that the man who goes to a banquet will enjoy it better if he doesn't expect the banquet to be the same printed menu, which he got somewhere, and brought with him".  Arnold notes that "in his own subtle way Jack was standing by the principle of a lifetime, that what matters most of all in the world, for the painter, was the unprejudiced, unrehearsed, unprogrammed encounter between each work, and the person standing in front of it, receiving its silent communications" (Jack Yeats, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998, p.344.)

A Garden in a City at Night  is typical of the late canvasses painted by Yeats in both its city subjects and its use of bright colour, particularly the cobalt blue, applied straight from the tube. Many of these works record the everyday life that Yeats enjoyed in his last years in Dublin. Although still painting a great deal - and many of his finest paintings come from this late period - by 1950 Jack had increasingly retired within the eighteenth century nursing home at Portobello (originally a hotel for travellers, on the Grand Canal) which was his on-off base throughout the late 1940s. He spent time reading and strolling about the town- appropriately last seen in public "walking alone, with his unmistakable sailor's gait, down the south quay of the Liffey, completely absorbed in the river and the ships that he loved" ( Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Biography, Routledge, London, 1970, p.172.)

The garden could be any one of the numerous railed squares throughout the Georgian centre of the city, which range in purpose from the 1963 Huguenot cemetery on Merrion Street to the public sanctuary of St Stephen's Green. Yeats was drawn to the Green as it provided refuge for the many diverse characters he was interested in observing in quiet moments, as he chronicled the passage of both visitors and workers through the city's leafy heart. Picked out here in dark teal green, the two figures are wrapped up against the cold in hats and coats, leaning back to merge with the wrought-iron railings as they talk, the flowerbeds behind them picking up the coloured accents of the garden's surroundings. The dominant blues of the night garden also continue the theme of many of Yeats' paintings of the 1940s: he himself described how "I know that indigo is not a primary colour. But it's an axel, the top of a Giant Stride, from which the ropes dangle in quietitude, but swing out wide in movement, when from the end of each a young boy floats. Indigo was the strongest colour in the old pictorial theatre posters which used to decorate two or three corners in the Seaport Town in the West of Ireland" ( 'Indigo Heights', The New Statesman and Nation, 5^th December 1936, pp. 899-900, quoted in Hilary Pyle, ibid, p. 135).