Jack B. Yeats, R.H.A.

Victor Waddington

London, Alpine Club Gallery, Paintings, 24 June - 7 July 1930, no.20;
Dublin, Engineers' Hall, Paintings, 21 April - 5 May 1931, no.8;
London, Waddington Galleries, Paintings, 28 March - 27 April 1963, no.12, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue;
Dublin, Dawson Gallery, Oil Paintings, 7 June - 7 July 1966, no.8, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue;
Montreal, Waddington Fine Arts, Yeats Retrospective Exhibition, 12 March - 5 April 1969, no.8, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue.

Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: a biography, London 1970, rev.ed.1989, pp.45 and 128, plate 15;
Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London 1992, no.368, illustrated. 

The colours are very slightly warmer and more vibrant than the illustration suggests. Original canvas in excellent original, clean condition with strong passages of toothpaste impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a plaster gilt frame under glass; unexamined out of frame.
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Painted in 1928, We are Leaving you Now is a highly important example of the bold, fluid and expressive painting style Yeats had developed over the preceding decade. In contrast to the more controlled nature of his oils from the early 1920s characterised by careful black outlines, the thick, flowing impasto of the present work highlights the young girl in the centre all the more vividly. She dominates the composition as she bids farewell to the final traveller in the train carriage, her gaze travelling beyond the picture plane, immediately luring the viewer into the narrative as he becomes the final person in the carriage, bereft as she and her friend 'are leaving you now'.

The impending departure of the young girl imbues a sense of mystery into the composition that is typical of the poetical nature of Yeats' oil paintings from the period. He captures the chance moment and electric tension between strangers who have become fleeting acquaintances on a journey, only for the intriguing relationship to be severed as one of the strangers disappears at their station, leaving an air of the unknown behind in the carriage. Indeed, Yeats wrote that 'the true artist has painted the picture because he wished to hold again for his pleasure - and for always - a moment and because he is impelled by his human affections to pass on the moment to his fellows and to those who come after him' (Yeats, 1922, quoted in Pyle, 1992, op.cit., p.xxii). Here, the young girl holds the 'moment' all the more powerfully as her unwavering stare leaves the viewer fixated on her, even after she has left the carriage.

By emphasizing the viewer's role outside the picture plane, the artist effortlessly places the viewer in the position of the artist himself and urges him to consider the greater symbolic meaning of the narrative. In leaving the carriage, the girl leaves the passenger on their own journey and as such, draws attention to a great metaphorical theme throughout Yeats' oeuvre concerning each man's own journey through life (see for example lots 128 and 156).  The concept of the ongoing cycle of life and death has important literary parallels and it is significant that Yeats' brother, William Butler Yeats, published his seminal poem on the theme, Sailing to Byzantium, in 1928, the same year as the present work. In the opening lines of the first stanza, the speaker declares that his homeland 'is no country for old men' as he departs for the 'holy city of Byzantium'. Just as the poem describes that man's vision of eternal life and his own metaphorical journey, We are leaving you now introduces the theme of destiny through the chance meeting of strangers but also as the young girl leaves the carriage to pursue her own version of 'what is past, or passing, or to come'. 

The strong element of poetical narrative in We are leaving you now emphasizes the crucial and unwavering relationship between artists and writers of the period. Yeats himself wrote six books and several plays and illustrated many of his brother's poems, including their collaborative efforts demonstrated most successfully in A Broadsheet and the Broadsides. As Jack described, 'it is very difficult to break up your thoughts and keep them apart. We are nearly all chain Thinkers' (Yeats, quoted in Pyle, 1992, op.cit, p.lxi). Indeed, as Pyle has highlighted, perhaps the most lyrical description of the mysterious girl in the present work is Yeats' own description of Ellen in Ah Well, who 'had a neck perpetually arched in a forgiving way, which made young men wish to cry, and old men to beat up the young men for their presumption' (Yeats, Ah Well, 1942, quoted in Pyle, 1992, op.cit, p.336.).

Yeats' development of a freer, looser and more vibrant painting style undoubtedly enabled him to express his thoughts more poetically. His formative work as a pictorial journalist and illustrator in the late 19^th century had already immaculately trained his eye to capture the minutiae of everyday detail and through his ongoing method of furiously sketching wherever he visited to commit past experiences to memory, he was already a extraordinary draughtsman. After his first foray into painting landscapes in oils on a trip to Clifden, Connemara in 1906, painting in oils allowed him to focus on developing a new visual language to express his thoughts more freely. He worked on a predominantly small scale until the early 1920s handling oils in a similar fashion to his characteristic watercolours with their distinctive illustrative black outline. By 1923, the outline had disappeared and the mid 1920s marked a dramatic change in his handling leading to the rich fluidity of the strokes in the present work. Alongside other key compositions from the mid 1920s such as The Breaker Out (1925) and The Bus by the River (1927), We are Leaving you Now marks a crucial climax in the early development of his painting style. The subtle but vibrant colouring to the girl's face and the warm reds, greens and yellows in the background of the carriage, are prophetic of the dramatic colouring to come in the proceeding decades and of the dynamic impasto that often verges on the abstract in the artist's work from the 1940s and 50s.

Indeed, the dynamic fusion of this new expressive painting style with the strong poetic narrative in We are Leaving you Now provides the ultimate visual manifestation of the Royal Hibernian Academy's statement in their annual report the year after the artist died that 'Yeats was the true painter poet...' (quoted in Pyle, op.cit., p.xxxiv).