Jack Butler Yeats, R.H.A.

Sold to Mrs MacBride, United States, in 1935;
Malcolm Rhodes MacBride (1916-1988), Cleveland, Ohio by whom bequeathed to Worcester Art Museum

Dublin, Engineers' Hall, Paintings, 1 - 14 October 1929, no.14;
London, Leger, Ireland and Irish Life in Paintings, 5 - 25 October 1932, no.15

Hilary Pyle, Jack Butler Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Vol. 1., Andre Deutsch, London 1992, no.399, p.362

The panel appears sound and the work in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a fleck of retouching above the heads of the riders, a small spot of retouching near left side of upper edge and a small spot above the head of the woman. Held in a grey painted plaster frame.
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With lively and colourful brushwork, Jack Butler Yeats depicts a father teaching his son how to manage a horse and cart; to the right a woman watches them pass. The fluidity of the painting animates the composition and emphasises the energy of the horse as it trots confidently by. The additional inclusion of various coloured pigments anticipates the increasingly bold palette Yeats employed in the years ahead. By the time of the present work, Yeats's break from his earlier delineated and more limited colour palette was well under way and The Learner epitomises the radical painterly technique of Yeats' most ambitious paintings.

Yeats was always captivated by life around him, eager to translate his experiences through paint in a manner which celebrated the Irish nation and character. He enjoyed a narrative element, as in the present work, and few subjects were beyond him. 'I have always watched things happening,' Yeats once declared (quoted in B. Arnold, Jack Yeats, 1993, p.x), and it was this endless curiosity, combined with the originality of his vision and painterly technique that defined him as one of the most innovative and prominent Irish artists of the twentieth century.