Jack B. Yeats, R.H.A.

Sold by the artist to Leo Smith, 1948;
Sir Hugh Beaver;
Mrs C. Lawson - Tancred, London;
Private Collection;
Sale, Christie's London, 8 June 1990, lot 297;
Private Collection

Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the oil paintings, Dublin 1992, no.846, illustrated.

Original canvas in good overall condition with strong passages of impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there is a fine horizontal line of retouching approx. 3in long below the centre of the upper edge that corresponds to a very sensitive repair to an old tear. Held in a painted plaster frame under glass; unexamined out of frame.
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Executed in 1947, Waiting for the Long Car captures a typically vivid impression of the way of life in the West of Ireland that was a crucial source of inspiration for Yeats throughout his career and which he immortalised in his illustrations for Life in the West of Ireland (1912). A well dressed country couple wait on the roadside for the energetic horses powering towards them from the distance pulling the long car.

The 'Bianconi' car was named after an Italian immigrant who invented the long car. During Yeats' formative years growing up around Sligo, the long car was the everyday method of transport in the west and south of Ireland and it was an important recurring subject for the artist (see for example fig 1). He paid special tribute to its inventor in his seminal large-scale oil of 1937, In Memory of Boucicault and Bianconi (coll. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin).

For Yeats, the long car also symbolized a contact with the outside world and in keeping with his ongoing interest in destiny (see also We are Leaving you Now, lot 139 and Meeting the Dawn, lot 156), it was a visual metaphor for each man's passage through life and the path to the future.