Louis le Brocquy, H.R.H.A. b.1916

Commissioned from the Artist by the original owner, July 1992

This double portrait of the two Yeats brothers (Jack, on the left, and the older W.B. on the right) is unique within the artist's oeuvre. It is probably also the only joint portrait of the two brothers - twin pillars, visual and literary, of the Celtic cultural renaissance - ever to be painted by an artist who knew both men in life. 

Although W.B. Yeats was a major theme in le Brocquy's work in the mid-1970s, presented as an iconic figure alongside the likes of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Federico Garcia Lorca, The Brothers Yeats is one of a very small number of treatments of Jack by the artist. Ironically, while le Brocquy remembered W.B. only from boyhood recollections, he frequently used to visit Jack during the 1940s at his studio at 18 Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin. This friendship is reflected in the nature of the left-hand portrait: it is among the most personal of all the artist's later paintings. Whereas W.B.'s essence has been distilled through countless studies until it is expressed in an almost abstract assembly of planes and ridges of paint, the portrait of Jack is much more subjective. Instead of the characteristic full-frontal gaze, his head is half turned away and he only just meets the viewer's eye, clearly reflecting the portrait's origins in life and in personal friendship between painter and subject. Undoubtedly, the contrast between the portraits is also due to the difference in the brothers' personalities, reflecting the comparison drawn even as early as July 1914 by Padraic Colum in his magazine T.P.'s Weekly:
    '[W.B.] more noticeable in the street for a personality that dress, manner and carriage made more remarkable. [Jack] more reserved and observant, like a sailor or a rancher; the one turning everything into intellectual terms and speaking constantly of art, the other turning everything into terms of life and speaking of little else.'

By 1992, the year in which this work was painted, le Brocquy had long-since established his own iconic status within the canon of twentieth century Irish art. Twenty years prior to the painting of The Brothers Yeats Herbert Read had already noted:
   'This painter from Joyce's Dublin did seem when I first met him in 1944 to have some qualities of Celtic origin. His images might have been found in a crock of gold and both Yeats the poet and his brother the painter might have been his ancestors. But since then le Brocquy's art has become emancipated from provincial myth and is now both independant and universal... He is a painter of the inner world of feeling and has become most curiously original... There can be no doubt that after many patient years of research this painter has found the irreducible symbols for what is basic to the life of the spirit ' (1971, Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer, New York, exhibition catalogue).