JOHN BUTLER YEATS | SELF-PORTRAIT

The Artist, thence by family descent

The present work relates to John Butler Yeats's great, last self-portrait (sold Sotheby's, Yeats: The Family Collection, 27 September 2017, lot 64) which he was commissioned to paint by his patron John Quinn while living in New York. The portrait became something of an obsession, 'I think of nothing else and dream of it' (JBY quoted in James White, John Butler Yeats and the Irish Renaissance, 1972, p.27). It resulted in a number of pencil studies such as the present example.