Jack B. Yeats, R.H.A. 1871-1957

Victor Waddington, Dublin
George Waddington Galleries, Montreal
Dr and Mrs N. Epstein, Montreal
Solomon Gallery, Dublin

Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, André Deutsch, London, 1992, p.699, no.775.

Painted in 1946, the view here is of a horse and trap, bounding across a lush spring landscape, bearing two passengers towards the front entrance of a graceful country house. The mood is elevated to the extent that the horse, vehicle and figures depart the ground altogether, neither hoof nor wheel touching the ground as the equipage sails through the clear air, which in turn permits a view all the way to the distant blue mountain.

That Yeats should have managed to convey such a sense of movement, life and even joy within the confines of a small 9 by 14 inch panel is remarkable, although not without comparison in the artist’s oeuvre. Similar freedom and spontaneity is observed through the eyes of a sedentary traveller, as he sits by a carriage window in The Nimrod of the Railway Train. Painted two years after Style, a horse and rider challenge the locomotive with gleeful abandon. Larger, at 18 by 24 inches, The Wild Ones of 1947 (sold in these rooms, 21^st May 1999, lot 331), shows a transfiguring ‘dance’ taking place between horse and figure, the players displaying an emotional kinship that goes well beyond any mere act of mutual co-operation. Although larger than the panels, feeling is still successfully conveyed here by Yeats through the medium of one of his smaller canvases. Such inhibition was, in the later years, more routinely expressed on a scale over twice as big, yet by the 1940s Yeats was at the height of his powers. Just as he had escaped the ‘tyranny of line’ in the mid- to late-1920s, abandoning his early graphic style for a more instinctive and much freer use of paint, here he is witnessed liberated from the dictates of material altogether, whether ink, paint or the support itself. Jewel-like in colouring and attention to detail (the traces, reins and clothes of the riders are all carefully picked out), Style is more than the cabinet picture its size might suggest it to be. It possesses all the aspiration the title implies and opens a perfectly formed window onto a sparkling world of thudding sound and whistling air.