Jack Butler Yeats, R.H.A.

Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin, 1946, where purchased by R. N. Flynn;
Professor Paddy Lynch;
Battersby's Auction Rooms, early 1950s where purchased by Miss Mary Mathews, Dublin, by whom gifted to a private collector and thence by descent to the present owner

Dublin, Victor Waddington Galleries, Oil Paintings, 30 October - 8 November 1946, no.9;
Leeds, Temple Newsham House, Loan Exhibition, 20 June - 4 August 1948, no.56;
London, Tate Gallery, Loan Exhibition, 14 August - 15 September 1948, no.56, with tour to Aberdeen Art Gallery and Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh

Hilary Pyle, Jack Butler Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Vol.II., Andre Deutsch, London, 1992, no.746, p.673

Original canvas. The work appears in very good overall condition with rich passages of impasto, ready to hang. Under ultraviolet light there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held under glass in a gilt plaster frame; unexamined out of frame.
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Painted in 1946, the present work depicts three figures in the dining car of a railway train as it surges headlong through the Irish landscape. The travellers gaze out of the large carriage windows as the countryside swirls past in an ebullient symphony of colour and movement. Yeats was a habitual rail traveller and he regularly referenced his encounters with other passengers and the memories of the landscape rushing by in his painting and writing. 

For Yeats the railway carriage became one of the most important themes in his oeuvre and a powerful metaphor for the transient and unrelenting journey of life itself. Yeats revisited the subject on numerous occasions. One of the earliest works that depicts a railway carriage is The Dawn, Holyhead (1920) showing a lonely figure who stares intently out of a small opening in the window at an unseen landscape as his companions sleep. Yeats began to develop and evolve the idea of the natural landscape as viewed from the train in Lough Owe, From the Train (1923) and returned to the theme in the mid-1940s producing a number of works of which Railway Refreshment Room is a significant example. In the present work there is a deeply contemplative feel to the figures as they look out of the window, all in slightly differing directions. They all quietly observe the natural landscape beyond the engineered confines of the carriage with a palpable sense of nostalgia, reflecting on life in their own individual ways. The window of the carriage acts as a frame to the landscape itself, a painting within a painting, and presents the Irish countryside in an intriguing triptych format. The viewer is invited to stand slightly behind the figures, peering over their shoulders to reflect on the vista outside. In the same year as the present work was executed Yeats painted two further works, The Mountain Window and Moorland Window, that both used windows as an artistic device to frame and present the landscape beyond. Moreover, in Railway Refreshment Room Yeats subtly contrasts the light filled beauty of the landscape with the cooler interior of the carriage, utilising subtle tones of grey, brown and ink dark blue.

Railway Refreshment Room is a reflective work with a prevalent sense of nostalgia; however, like many of Yeats great works there is at the same time a strong sense of hopefulness and optimism. The work is as much a joyful celebration of the landscape of Ireland, shimmering in whites and pinks from the railway carriage window, as it is a contemplative musing on the human journey.