Monte Alverno - An Irish Private Collection

Monte Alverno - An Irish Private Collection

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 30. The City.

Auction Closed

May 26, 03:18 PM GMT

Estimate

150,000 - 250,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

Jack B. Yeats, R.H.A.

1871 - 1957

The City


signed JACK B YEATS (lower left); titled (on the reverse)

oil on panel

unframed: 23 by 35.5cm.; 9in by 14in

framed: 48 by 61cm.; 19 by 24in.

Executed in 1944. 

Please note that this lot will be sent to our Greenford Park warehouse after the auction.
The Artist
Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin, where acquired by Jack Toohey in 1944
Sale, Adam's, Dublin, 15 December 1988, lot 69
Hilary Pyle (ed.), Jack B. Yeats A Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings, 1992, vol. II, no. 586, p. 538

The City is one of several cityscapes painted by Jack B. Yeats, a subject which he first produced in 1920s. The artist lived in Dublin from 1917 until his death in 1957 and frequently walked through the streets of its city centre on his way to the theatre, galleries and or to browse in book stalls and shops. These sojourns provided plenty of inspiration for his paintings. The view in this work is of College Green, with the grand columned portico of the Bank of Ireland dominating the middle background. A horse-drawn cart gallops along in front of it. To the left is a tram with passengers standing on its open upper deck. 


A young boy stands in the foreground, his head bent back, and his fist raised. He is a newsboy and has just sold a paper to the man beside him. The customer, a middle-class gentleman wearing a smart hat, is already engrossed in the news, oblivious to the noise and scenery surrounding him. To the right at the very front of the composition is the head and shoulders of a young woman, fashionably dressed in a picture hat and padded shouldered jacket. Her closed eyes suggest the immediacy of the moment, as if her image had been captured instantaneously by a camera.


The painting sets the wide space and grandeur of College Green against the bustle and movement of its citizens as they hurry by. The figure of the man, reading his paper which flutters in the breeze, introduces a note of rest and concentration into this excitement, a moment of inner reflection in contrast to physical and sensual stimulation. The varying applications of paint across the composition adds to this notion of physicality by making the viewer conscious of their own perception of differing textures and surfaces. Opaque pinks, blues and greys evoke the dry ground of the road and the façades of the buildings. The colourful tram and the sky above are constructed out of dynamic strokes of pigment that indicate energy and motion. The figures in the foreground are made of thick impasto, giving their form solidity. Positioned as they are at the very front of the composition, they enable a striking sense of depth and perspective to be created between them and the streetscape behind them.


The painting was purchased from Victor Waddington in 1944 by Jack Toohey, owner of Doreen Holdings, a very successful textile and garment business. Jack and his wife, Agnes, possessed an important collection of modern Irish art comprising several works by Yeats, including A Belle in Chinatown, an image of New York city, which Toohey acquired in 1943.


Dr Róisín Kennedy