Painting 'the ginger of Life'

A Laurel for Jack B. Yeats (1871~1957)

____________________________ ____________________________

By Maureen E. Mulvihill

Special to the W B Yeats Society of New York ~ Autumn 2009

Figure 1. Jacket, Declan Foley's Yeats (Dublin: Lilliput, 2009; 204 pp. Illustrated).

Cover Art: Men of Destiny by Jack B. Yeats. Oil on canvas. 20 x 27″. 1946.

National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

Perhaps these three, mooring their boat at Rosses Point, Sligo, are the famous Yeats men: John, 'Willie', and 'Jack'.

http://www.galeriedada.com/jack-butler-yeats-men-of-destiny-00001925.html

A review of The Only Art of Jack B. Yeats: Letters & Essays,

edited by Declan J. Foley (Dublin: Lilliput, 2009; illustrated)

Music Track: (1 minute): Instrumental excerpt from Douglas Lee Saum's setting of W B Yeats's
'Double Vision of Michael Robartes' The Wild Swans At Coole (CD, 2005)
(c) Douglas Lee Saum

Document Design: Maureen E. Mulvihill, Brooklyn, NY

HTML Document Creation: Daniel R. Harris, Brooklyn, NY

Digital Installation: Will Linden, Website Manager ~ W B Yeats Society of New York

_______________ _______________

To the memory of my mother, painter Esther Elizabeth Byrne Mulvihill (1916-2009),

a woman of unusual beauty & talent, guardian of my early beginnings.

It was not easy to be Jack Butler Yeats. Beset with the dual burden of identity and fame, he wisely distanced himself from most of the Yeatses and proved more a Pollexfen (his mother's line) than a Yeats. In the second half of his career (circa 1920s-1950s), when he moved from commercial art to fine art, he proved more a European painter than an Irish one. His bold use of colour and symbolism, and his abstracted renderings of sea, land, sky, and the human figure, were inspired by the thrilling new styles of the painterly avant-garde: mostly the European expressionists. Considering the arc of his evolution from B&W line drawing - hundreds of comic cartoons, portrait-sketches, broadsheet and magazine illustrations - to the serious oil canvases of his mature work, Jack Yeats's task was to move beyond the creative isolation of Irish (and British) art to a bolder aesthetic and technique. He found this on the easels of his foreign contemporaries. In his final years, Jack Yeats produced a prodigious number of remarkable paintings: The Two Travelers (1942), River Mouth (1946), Men of Destiny (1946; Figure 1), Seek No Further II (1947), Glencar, Sligo (1949), Queen Maeve Walked Upon This Strand (1950), A Rose Among Many Waters (1952), and others. Many of the later canvases (some, ambitious large-scale works) are now judged the best of his vast corpus. It is only regrettable that his important transition from representational art to the more charged modernistic style of his final years occurred so late in his career.

Declan J. Foley, in his collection of letters and essays, The Only Art (Dublin: Lilliput, 2009; Figure 1), selects Jack's mother, Susan Pollexfen (1841-1900), as dedicatee. This was an astute gesture as the Yeats household lacked a stable husband and father figure: '[She was] that most unacknowledged and all-important person - the silent and shadowy genesis to all this creativity - wife, above all mother, who through her story-telling awakened the imaginative process in her gifted children, `Willy' and Lilly and Lollie and Jack' ([viii]). Jack evidently inherited artistic talent from his father, painter John Butler Yeats (1839-1922), who left his country and family in 1908 at the age of 69 to pursue broader opportunities in New York City; he sort of ran away from home to the `huge fair' of the big city. (This problematic, if embarrassing, fact of the Yeats saga is tactically reframed by some of Foley's essayists.) But it was the mother of the Yeats household, Susan Pollexfen and her kin, who served as watchful stewards of Jack's development. To the extent that they shaped his early character, it was the Pollexfens and the scenic environs of Sligo (that 'land of heart's desire', as his older poetic brother famously wrote) which created Jack Yeats, certainly the early Jack Yeats.

The Yeatses were a gifted family, but also a troubled lot (dysfunctional, according to some biographers). The children required special care; and of all the Yeats siblings, Jack was evidently the least bedeviled owing to wise and tender guidance by his mother's parents, principally William Pollexfen of Sligo (miller and also founder, Sligo Steam Navigation Company). Grandpapa Pollexfen was a formidable seafaring man, rich in tales and lore: a `characterful' man in the old Irish style. It was this imposing figure, not Jack's improvident father, who raised young Jack Yeats and who instilled in him a lifelong love of narrative and a special bond with land, sea, boats, and the faces and look of Ireland's West Country. Jack's canvases would ever retain some flavour of the sentimental and the nostalgic (Irish romanticism being the indelible thing it is). Jack Yeats was not a natural genius; he was trained at several art schools in London: in South Kensington, in Chiswick, in Bedford Park, in West London, and in Westminster. As a student, he was a casual sampler and individualist; he never completed a formal course of study. As a practitioner, however, he was all application and gusto. His public career as a commercial artist began in his late teens as an illustrator for magazines in Manchester and in London; he drew for The Vegetarian, The Manchester Guardian, Punch, and others. Publishers kept him employed with free-lance work and then regular commissions.

London played a critical role in the first half of Jack Yeats's life; he was born in London, schooled there, first employed there, and also found his 'Mrs Jack' there: Mary 'Cottie' Cottenham White (wed, 1894). Yet his first allegiance was always to Ireland, the land of his people. During the Irish Troubles, Yeats declared Republican sympathies in his painting of the funeral of Harry Boland, a close associate of 'Mick' Collins. This depiction of 1922 (an example of Yeats's compositional skill in group scenes) is the only extant visual record of that event: The Funeral of Harry Boland. But Jack Yeats would eventually move beyond the provincial Irish settings of his youth and early maturity - circuses, clowns, dance-halls, boxers, tourists -- to try out other subjects and other ways of painting. And this transition was a long time coming. He did not step out of Northern Europe until 1904, at the age of 33, when he visited New York City for the first (and only) time.

Figure 2. Jack Yeats in New York City, 1904, age 33.

B&W photographic print 24cm x 18cm on board by Alice Boughton

(Brooklyn, 1865 ~ Long Island, NY, 1943), member, Stieglitz circle.

See Boughton, Photographing the Famous (NY, 1928).

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. With permission.

This was an important trip for a successful commercial artist interested in moving on and moving up; and during this first international trip, Jack was exposed to the New York art market and he met important members of the Modern art scene: painters, art dealers, curators, gallery directors, art collectors. He also met Mark Twain (an entrancing raconteur, like Grandpapa Pollexfen).

But his best New York contact proved to be John Quinn, a lawyer, collector, and arts patron, who would purchase some of Yeats's work over the years and also serve as a savvy American mentor to the Yeatses ('our man in New York'). While in New York, Jack did several drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge, marveled at a Matisse in the Metropolitan, and exhibited at Clausen's Gallery. Of the 63 Yeatses at Clausen's, only 12 sold, realizing $430 (see Pyle, Yeats 82-86; Murphy, Family Secrets 288-9). Jack Yeats was a stern businessman, asking high prices; reasonably, his father's irregular income and (mostly) lacklustre career, both in Ireland and New York, had set a cautionary precedent for the aspiring son. A reliable glimpse of Jack Yeats in New York exists in his correspondence with John Quinn, 1902-1923 (New York Public Library, Quinn Collection, Mss & Archives Division, Box 49, ff. 3-7); and some of the Quinn-Yeats correspondence is valuably printed in Foley's book (pp. 22-28, 85-86). For another glimpse of Jack in New York, there is Alice Boughton's studio portrait of a dashing Jack Yeats, all set for the big city (Figure 2). During his New York visit, Jack would have seen the work of the Ashcan School of American Art (John Sloan, et al.) and he would have been exposed to a bohemian cachet and painterly 'urban realism' unfamiliar to him in Irish circles where stylish society portraiture by William Orpen and John Lavery was much in vogue. Yeats did not return to New York for the momentous 1913 Armory Show of mostly Modern art (Figure 3), but he did contribute six works, all included, for the first time ever, in Foley's collection - nice plum for Foley and Lilliput. The finest of these is The Circus Dwarf of 1912 (color reproduction, p. 89). It was Yeats's new associate John Quinn who gave the opening talk at the Armory Show, and Quinn's words were prescient: 'Tonight will be the red-letter night in the history of not only American but of all modern art.... [We] felt it was time the American people had an opportunity to see and judge for themselves the work of the Europeans who are creating a new art.' Jack Yeats was one of these.

Figure 3. Famous Poster of a Famous Art Show. The New York Armory Show, 1913.

Jack B. Yeats contributed 6 oil paintings.

See Betsy Fahlman's essay in Foley's "Yeats (2009), pp. 87-98, 6 color images.

But New York was only one of several new exposures. It was the more radical approach of the European expressionist painters, particularly in Germany - their forceful colour, impasto technique, their sheer visual power and bold compositional approach - which changed the aesthetic of Jack Yeats. His association with Oskar Kokoshka, a principal Expressionist proponent who visited Ireland in the 1920s, encouraged this transition. During the 1920s, according to one biographer of Jack Yeats, Jack had become increasingly aware of stylistic restrictions in his work; he was having difficulties with colour, tone, and compositional balance. He sought freedom, unavailable to him in his usual conventional technique (Arnold, 'Jack Butler Yeats,' Oxford DNB, 2004). Figure 4, below, from this transitional period, captures something of the painter's mood and ambivalence. Yeats's changes during these years were not merely stylistic; he was developing a new way of seeing and painting. Impact and intensity were the goals of the mature Yeats style: he had begun to paint like a poet. Seeing this at once in his son's work, John Butler Yeats said to Bishop Harvey, 'Someday, I shall be remembered as the father of a great poet - and the poet is Jack' (Wm M. Murphy, Prodigal Father [1978], 209). The Expressionists were the quiet hands behind the best of Jack's later art, work which carried a charge and empathy unfelt in the earlier watercolours, line-drawings, and genre pieces of Irish life. It is the Expressionists who resonate in Yeats's Men of Destiny (Figure 1, above) and in his serious work in oils dating from the 1920s.

Figure 4. Jack B. Yeats, Self-portrait before easel, c 1920, about age 37.

Pencil Drawing (graphite on paper), 35cm x 25cm. Signed 'JBY'.

Gift (1961) to the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, from Victor Waddington, London.

With permission, NYARS and National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

Ciarán Bennett, an art critic in Dublin, President of the International Association of Art Critics Ireland, and presently at work on a first-ever biography of Modern art critic and curator James Johnson Sweeney (1900-1986), emphasized Jack Yeats's shift in artistic vision in recent communications with this writer:

'Well, Jack Yeats didn't get to New York to see and be seen until mid-life, really; and it was not until after the death [from heart disease] of his beloved wife 'Cottie', in 1947, that his most memorable work, resounding with contemporary political and cultural significance, began to emerge. The most arresting canvas of this later period - quintessential Jack Yeats - is There Is No Night [1949; 102 x 152 cm; title from Revelations 22:5]. It offers an evocative moment of the Celtic Twilight, displaying the impasto relish and bravura brushwork of an Abstract Expressionist - and sometimes, in these later pictures, the paint was applied directly on the canvas from the tube. Jack Yeats the illustrator always had a presence, a signature style; but all that changed in the later years, and much for the better. This took time and the dear price of personal crises: Cottie's death and, before that, his long bout with depression. In some circles, Jack Yeats will ever be an overrated painter at a time when Irish cultural capital wasquite low. He added some much-needed lustre.' (For There is No Night, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, see the Gallery's online site.)

The 'only art' for Jack Yeats was the 'art' of living. As Paul Valéry said, 'One must always apologise for talking about art.' Jack resisted all wheedlings; he gave little away. The closest he came to commenting on art was a rare moment in a bad interview with Eamonn Andrews (Radio Éireann, RTÉ, 1947; transcription, Foley, Yeats, pp. 29-31):

'I dislike the word art as to painting. There is only one art and that is the art of living. Painting is an occupation that's in that art, and that occupation is the freest of all the occupations of living. There is no alphabet, no grammar. No rules whatever. Many hopeful sportsmen have tried to invent rules and have always failed. Any person or group of persons who try to live life with rules do a disservice to this occupation of living. They forget that painting is tactics and not strategy. It is carried out in the face of the enemy' [emphasis added].

Whether working in commercial art or fine art, Jack B. Yeats had one abiding goal: capture 'the very ginger of Life' - its spice and drama, whatever makes it authentic, including its darker moments (Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Biography xiii). Irish Republican radicals, for example, were not to Yeats's tastes, but they had what he admired: passionate commitment. Thus, his homage to Harry Boland, mentioned above. The Expressionist manner of Yeats's later work perfectly matched the mood and temper of his mature years. While outwardly a reserved, even inexpressive personality (one sees this in the painful RTÉ interview and in his extant letters), Yeats's relationship to the canvas had taken on a turbulence and wildness unexpressed elsewhere in his life, qualities not unlike the 'Sublime' of Edmund Burke and the energy of William Blake's mythic universe. Because there had been a change in the man, there was a change in the aesthetic. The best and last works were a splendour of colour: a melding of memory, narrative, and legend. A fantastical fusion.

Since his death in 1957, Jack Yeats and his rather huge output - some 1100 oils, numerous illustrations, comic cartoons, drawings, watercolours, as well as seven novels and nine plays - have drawn serious attention. Art gallery directors, collectors, and museum curators, on both sides of the Atlantic, have contributed to the Jack Yeats renaissance with recent exhibitions and acquisitions. Auctioneers have also played a role; to his credit, Jack Yeats was the first Irish painter to set an auction record: The Wild Ones, Sotheby's London, 1999, -L-1,233,500. He is now judged the most important Irish painter in the first half of the 20^th century, eliciting from Samuel Beckett a response of 'wonderstruck...[he's] an artist who comes from nowhere, he has no brothers' (see Beckett, Jack B. Yeats: The Late Paintings [Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1991]). In Jack B. Yeats's last days in Portobello Nursing Home, Dublin, 1957, then 87 years of age and a widower since 1947, he must have anticipated his impact on Irish art, for he would change the face of painting in Ireland. The extent to which Jack B. Yeats is a 'great' painter, in an age which produced artists of the highest distinction - Braque, Matisse, Picasso, the European Expressionists, the Abstract Expressionists - will be decided in the fullness of time.

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With a view to opening 'the folded heart' of Jack B.Yeats to another generation, we now have Declan Foley's recent book, The Only Art of Jack B. Yeats. This volume, in development for some years, is a collection of letters, mostly by John Butler Yeats to his son Jack B. Yeats, and 12 original essays (including both Declan Foley's essay and Bruce Stewart's splendid Foreword). In addition to the father's correspondence to the son (some 60 selected letters), the book prints correspondence from Jack Yeats to Sarah Purser (7 short letters), and 6 of Jack Yeats's (short) letters to John Quinn (Quinn's important role in the Yeats saga is mentioned above). Foley's sources, importantly, are the late William Murphy, being Murphy's transcriptions of various letters unused in Murphy's Letters from Bedford Park (1972), as well as selected archives at the University of Victoria Libraries and the New York Public Library.

A delightful bonus of the Jack Yeats letters selected for Foley's book are the sketches which Jack enjoyed including directly in the body of his letters. What fun to receive a letter from Jack Yeats! One had his light incidental chat about various doings, as well as amusing caricatures and cartoons of selected events and individuals mentioned in the letters. Jack Yeats was a special epistolarist who sent illustrated letters, combining text and image:

Figure 5. The Yeatses, Christmas in Devon, 1904. By Jack B. Yeats.

Jack Yeats sketching his wife, 'Cottie' ('Mrs Jack'). Art imitating life.

This drawing is in Jack Yeats's letter to John Quinn, 13th December 1904 (Foley, Yeats, pp 23-24)

See Arnold Harvey's essay on sketches in Jack's letters, in Foley, Yeats, pp 68-75.

There are surprisingly few of Jack Yeats's letters in Foley's book, and the ones selected are brief, even perfunctory. The weight of the book, with regard to its letters, emanates from the correspondence from Yeats père to Yeats frère. And these selections are most welcome. The letters from John Butler Yeats to Jack Yeats in Foley's book offer a new window on the relationship between this father and this son; they also let us listen to the voice of an older painter advising and encouraging a younger painter, a painter who is both a blood relation and a rising star. The letters of the father selected for Foley's volume are serious and sober: Polonius advising Laertes, at some turns. A recurring theme is the father's concern with the son's development as an artist and as a successful career painter; John's letters to Jack are full of tactical advice regarding who's who. John Yeats is keen to direct his son to the people who 'do things', who get things done in life (p. 55). And he urges Jack to get out of Ireland, as he himself did: 'I wish you could escape from suffering Europe and take a voyage here to New York, and live a while in Petitpas [the boarding-house / restaurant, West 29^th St., where the father rented modest quarters]. There is a fine room next to mine. It intoxicates me to think of this' (p. 113). When the father speaks of art, he sometimes offers his son contentious opinions and some total nonsense: '...remember that all artists and poets have been shameless plagiarists .... you yourself know swarms of little artists who refuse to imitate anybody, and [have] come to nothing....There is no progress in art, as there is none in the singing of birds' (pp. 148-9). Did Jack accept this? Clearly, he did not, and let us hope that some of his father's armchair philosophy and aesthetical blather raised a chuckle. Jack Yeats was not a shameless plagiarist, of course, and he did do something entirely new: he applied the technique and aesthetic of his bold contemporaries, the Expressionists, to what he knew best: images of Ireland, be they fantasy or fact. He distinguished himself as Ireland's first expressionist painter. A winning and original combination, to be sure. But back to the father's letters:

John also identifies networking opportunities for Jack, even providing full contact information (mailing addresses, etc.). For the old man, New York City was a siren song where he had hoped to yet make his fortune. But most audible in the letters is a strain of guilt and sorrow which occasionally rises in the elder's voice. Many letters disclose the father's great love and loneliness for family and nation, notwithstanding his quiet love affair with Rosa Butt, a matter sensitively handled elsewhere (see Murphy's Family Secrets, pp. 321-360): 'I am really...very lonely,' writes John Yeats to his son, 'God grant that I get home this summer' (p54). Sadly, no return trip home to Ireland was ever made by the father. On another occasion, he complains of not receiving enough attention from his correspondents, but then he admits that he fails to 'deserve' it. 'Why do you never write to me?' he sadly asks his son (p. 109).

What is absent in these groupings of letters, obviously, are letters from the son back to the father. Where are Jack Yeats's letters to John Butler Yeats? The correspondence, as Foley represents it, is entirely one-sided (there is no dialogue or exchange). Only the voice of the father is heard. To rectify this gap, one must look to other work on Jack Yeats and the Yeats family correspondence. Notwithstanding, the letters from John to Jack in this volume offer themselves as valuable new paradigms to be appreciated and studied, and so a genuine contribution to the subject.

Of the other letters in the book, Jack Yeats's five letters to John Quinn, during the period 1903-1911, from Devon and then from Wicklow, to Quinn in NYC, are remarkable for documenting the congenial relationship between the painter and his important American contact, as well as Jack's movements and tastes as he practices the 'only art': living life. In his casual, unpretentious style, he comments on the Abbey Theatre, on Masefield, on Velasquez, on Synge, on Howard Pyle, and on art he has viewed at The Irish National Gallery: '... most painting now is suffering from inbreeding; but there are signs that some of the painter boys are realizing that life is still here tumbling about' (p. 28). Jack's sketches in the Quinn letters are delightful, and they display his talent in B&W line-drawing. The pugilist cartoon Hard Knocks is not to be missed (p. 26); likewise, the happy domestic scene of the Yeatses, presented above (Figure 5).

There are some good letters by Jack Yeats which might have been included in Foley's book. The University of Delaware Library, Newark, preserves 90 items of Jack's correspondence, 1906-1957; he writes to Lady Gregory; Kilham Roberts (Society of Artists); publisher Elkin Matthews; Macmillan & Co., where we valuably see Jack wrangling over publication matters; Eleanor & Frederick Reid; et al.

Unlike his father and older brother, Jack Yeats was not a garrulous, loose-lipped man; he reveals little of himself in his letters; and he does not discuss his work in any serious way, nor the world of art, really, other than a few sideglances to miscellaneous matters. Little of the private man is disclosed. And the explanation for this could be simple and obvious: Jack was not a natural writer — no wordsmith he. His father, on the other hand, was as good a writer as he was a talker; John's earlier training in law gave him the discipline to express himself well in words. Jack's letters are spare; John's, often effusive. (A difficult task, opening the 'folded heart' of Jack Yeats; for that, we must go to his spectacular oils of the 1940s.)

But what did these letters look like, in their original state? Foley and Lilliput should have included in the volume a few photofacsimiles, both of Jack's quick notes and his father's ponderous, determinedly paternalistic prose. Readers, especially newcomers to the Yeats story, would have appreciated seeing images of the actual correspondence - the script, the formatting, the layout and 'feel' of these communications. This, too, is a window on the book's larger subject. (Evidently, space and/or budgetary constraints pre-empted a broader selection of choices, as well as images of the letters.)

The book's essays cover a tantalizing range of topics, and nearly all of them are about Jack Yeats, thus balancing the letter selections most of which are not (the letters display the temperament and interests of Jack's father, mostly, who for all his sins was a charismatic fellow and certainly one of the truly big talkers in life). The sequencing of the essays is smartly creative: each grouping of letters is followed by original essays which discuss aspects in the letters' contents. Foley's essayists - art historians, art gallery directors, academics, et al. - are longstanding devotées of the Yeats saga; and would it not have been interesting and also balancing to have invited a contrarian or two into the mix? All of the essays are useful and informative; moreover, they hope to correct some of the lore and rumour in Yeats Studies with a broader, more balanced view; most notably, Maureen Murphy's piece on the relationship between the Yeats siblings. Likewise, Avis Berman's fascinating essay on John Sloan's 'path' to his painting of John Butler Yeats and John's circle at Pepitas. Art historians will be especially grateful for as many as five quality essays which speak directly to Jack B. Yeats the Artist: Giovanna Tallarico, on the role of the European Expressionists in Yeats's later work; Leslie Waddington, on the critical relationship between Jack Yeats and Leslie's father, Victor Waddington, Jack's exclusive art dealer (1944-1957); Betsy Fahlman, on the importance to Jack's career of the 1913 New York Armory Show (and she properly includes images of his six contributions); Arnold Harvey's delightful engagement with the sketches in Jack's letters; and arguably the best essay of the lot, Hilary Pyle's piece on the craftsmanship of Jack's work, primarily his work in stencil portraiture (a rare view of the mechanics of the creative process). Finally, there are three essays which approach the Yeats subject from a different angle: John Loughery on painter John Sloan; John Purser on the existential edge in Samuel Beckett and Jack Yeats; and Roisin Kennedy on Jack Yeats's uses of Dublin City in his art.

The design and physical properties of the book, often overlooked by reviewers, merit a good word, beginning with Niall McCormack's riveting dust jacket whose cover art displays a detail of Yeats's Men of Destiny (Figure 1, above). McCormack also includes some delightful cartoons and sketches by Yeats on the jacket's back cover and back flap. The page layouts and typography are managed satisfactorily, though some readers will expect more images and larger images, and many of the reproductions of the later canvases (the oils) are too dark. The book generously includes some of the artwork of Yeats's New York circle, such as John Sloan's famous painting of John Butler Yeats with his usual dinner crowd: Yeats at Petitpas' (1910), facing page 119, the best color image in the book. The volume's apparatus (its documentation) is all in good order, with informative endnotes for each essay, as well as a Glossary of Names compiled by Frank Bennett, Jr., being of special use to non-specialists. While the book oddly lacks a List of Illustrations and also an Index (serious omissions in a busy volume of images, names, places, dates, and titles), it does offer four Appendices which supply good information, such as Appendix II, being excerpted commentary on Jack Yeats by his contemporaries.

The principal achievement of this book, though, must be the editor's. Declan J. Foley is a Sligo man by birth and breeding who knows the history and land of the Yeats family; he thus has a contact with the Irish soil sometimes missed by Yeats commentators. As he makes known in his (mostly autobiographical) essay (pp. 1-11), Foley has a personal connection to Sligo ways: its history, its sea, its terrain, its faces, its culture. And perhaps working to advantage in this project, Foley is not a degreed academic, nor is he an historian, painter, or art critic. The man is a lifelong student, reader, and writer who knows his subject first-hand and seeks to learn more. He has earned his stripes not in the academies, but rather as an active practitioner. A vigorous advocate of Jack Yeats's father, Foley convened the John Butler Yeats seminars in Chestertown, New York, in 2001, 2004, and 2007; a fourth is being planned for 2010 at Trinity College Dublin (http://www.johnbutleryeatsseminar.com). Foley is also a writer of acerbic opinion pieces in the Irish and British press, commenting on the decline of arts patronage and Irish political leadership. He left his homeland in 1987 to relocate in Melbourne, Australia, where Foley founded Bloomsday and also became secretary of the Melbourne Yeats Society. His website (in development) and the Yeats Discussion List which Foleymoderates (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/yeatsian/) are sources of timely discussion. When asked by this writer why he left Ireland for Australia, he replied:

'It was not just the awful weather, it was the hold of the gombeen men and the general political indifference and paralysis. I saw it all coming in, on so many levels ... very distressing to me as an Irishman. But I continue to do what I can, from my perch here in Australia, to move forward the interests of Sligo and the Yeatses. It's been a challenge, not without its victories. Yet, one is always distracted, for example, by the rancour of some Yeatsians who deride the reputation of the father, John Butler Yeats. He was an important tutor and educator of 'Willie', he also had an influence on the Ashcan group of American artists. Along with others, I've more than done my part to set straight the record on the father by putting together three dedicated seminars on him in Chestertown, NY since 2001 and now a fourth meeting planned in Dublin. There is richness in the Yeats family and we must continue to distribute it to the world.'

The market for this interesting and readable collection of letters and essays is varied, to Foley's advantage, for the book will attract Yeatsians and also students of Irish art. We wish Mr Foley brisk sales and good reviews. More than that, we wish him continuing success as he hones the craft of 'the only art' and watches for 'the ginger of Life.'

Sources & Further Reading

Archives (locations of work by Jack B. Yeats; selections)

In the U.S.: Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Manuscripts & Archives Division, New York Public Library. Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. University of Delaware Library, Newark, DE. Burns Library, Boston College. Stanford University Library, CA. Falvey Library, Villanova University, Pa. (Cuala Press Broadside Collection illustrated by Jack Yeats; visit Villanova's gallery at online site). Schaffer Library, Special Collections, Union College, Schenectady, NY (Yeats archive formed by William M. Murphy).

In Canada: McPherson Library, University of Victoria Libraries, British Columbia.

In the Republic of Ireland: National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.

In the UK: Tate Britain, London. British Library, London. Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds. University of Reading Library, Berkshire.

Scholarship & Commentary (selections)

Bruce Arnold. Jack Yeats. Yale University Press, 1998.

_____. 'Jack B. Yeats' (illustrated). Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004.

_____. 'Jack B. Yeats.' Dictionary of Irish Biography.Royal Irish Academy, 2009.

Ciarán Bennett. Forthcoming essay, in Vol. 1, on contemporary art in Ireland. In Art and Architecture of Ireland, 5 vols. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. Series in progress.

Joan Hardwick. The Yeats Sisters: A Biography of Susan & Elizabeth Yeats. London: Pandora, 1996.

William M. Murphy. Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats & His Relatives. Syracuse UP, 1995.

Hilary Pyle. Jack B. Yeats: A Biography. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, 1989.

_____. Jack B. Yeats: A Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings. Deutsch, 1992.

_____. The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats: His Cartoons and Illustrations. Irish Academic Press, 1994

T G Rosenthal. The Art of Jack B. Yeats. Deutsch, 1993, 2003.

James White. 'Jack B. Yeats.' Dictionary of Literary Biography. Eds. E T Williams & Helen Palmer.

Oxford University Press, 1971 edition.

Recent Exhibitions

2002. Elizabeth ('Lollie') Yeats, sister of Jack Yeats, and co-founder, Cuala Press, included in the online exhibition, Unseen Hands: Women Printers, Binders & Book Designers. Princeton University Library, Graphic Arts Collection, Rebecca W. Davidson, curator (2000-04); visit http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/rbsc2/ga/unseenhands/. See also Joan Hardwick, above; and Maureen Murphy in Foley's Yeats (2009), pp. 134-143.

2007. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Jack B. Yeats: Masquerade and Spectacle.

Visit http://goireland.about.com/od/dublinsmuseumsgalleries/gr/yeats_spectacle.htm.

For Minister Brennan's speech, opening the show, visit http://www.arts-sport-tourism.gov.ie/publications/release.asp?ID=2047.

Market Valuations & Auction Results for Jack B. Yeats

http://www.invaluable.com/catalog/searchLots.cfm?scp=m&aID=414397&ord=2&ad=DESC

http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/search/Search_Repeat.aspx?searchtype=AUCTION_RECORDS&artist=10060032

Sound

Interview with Jack B. Yeats by Eamonn Andrews, 'Microphone Parade' series, 10 October 1947, Radio Éireann. RTÉ Radio Archives. As of Sept 2009, this recording is no longer available on RTÉ's Web site, nor is it likely to be reinstalled, but a copy of the tape may be ordered from RTÉ. (This is not a good interview, but it does disclose certain qualities of Jack B. Yeats.) For a transcription of this interview, see Foley, Yeats (2009), pp 29-31.

Discussion on painting & writing, Jack B. Yeats with historian Thomas MacGreevy, 1947. See British Library, National Sound Archive, catalogue no.T7655R/1 (17 May 1948). The BL has not digitised this tape recording for remote access over the Internet; to date, the tape can only be heard by visiting the BL's Listening Service in person and by appointment (Listening@bl.uk; +44 (0)20 7412 7418).

Settings of selected poetry by William Butler Yeats, on CD, by Douglas Lee Saum, composer & musician (Reno, Nevada; Yeats Summer School, Co. Sligo, Republic of Ireland); for selections, visit http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/dlswby3

Acknowledgments

The author takes pleasure in thanking all of the following in the preparation and assemblage of this essay. In the U.S.: Andy McGowan and Will Linden, NY Yeats Society, New York City; Douglas Lee Saum, composer-musician, Reno, Nevada (Yeats Summer School, Co. Sligo, Republic of Ireland); Daniel R. Harris, Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY; Janet Hicks & Chelsea Rhadigan, Artists Rights Society New York / DACS, London; Wendy Hurlock Baker, Rights & Reproductions, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; L. Rebecca Johnson Melvin, Special Collections (Mss.), University of Delaware, Newark; Bente Polites, Special Collections, Villanova University, Pa. In the Republic of Ireland: Leah Benson, Archivist, Library & Research Services (Yeats Collection), National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; Louise Morgan, Rights & Reproductions, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; John Glendon, RTE Radio Archives; Ciarán Bennett, art critic, Dublin. In Britain: Rod Hamilton, British Library, London, National Sound Archives.

A Note on the Author

portrait of author

Maureen E. Mulvihill, a Scholar & Writer with the Princeton Research Forum (Princeton NJ), is a broadly published specialist on Irish and English literatures. After earning a PhD at Wisconsin in 1982, she studied at the Yale Center for British Art, the Columbia University Rare Book School, and (as an NEH Fellow) Johns Hopkins University. Her recent credits in Irish Studies include: Contributor, 'Mary Shackleton Leadbeater,' Dictionary of Irish Biography (2009); Advisory Editor, Ireland And The Americas, 3 vols (ABC-Clio, 2008); Editor, Poems (1808) of Mary Shackleton Leadbeater (Irish Women Poets online textbase, Alexander Street Press, Va., 2008); Speaker, James Johnson Sweeney Conference, Jackson Pollock-Lee Krasner Foundation (SUNY-Stony Brook), 2008; Contributor, 'Mary Tighe', 'Biddy Jenkinson', 'Emma Donoghue,' Irish Women Writers, ed Alexander Gonzalez (2006); Contributor, 'James Esdall', Irish patriot printer-publisher of 18thC Dublin, Oxford DNB (2004); Contributor, Irish Literary Supplement (1997-); Feature Writer, 'Wall Street Irish: The Making o' the Green' (World of Hibernia, launch issue, 1995); etc. She has been a guest speaker and visiting professor on several campuses, most recently St John's University, Manhattan campus (2005-2007), where she taught Shakespeare and also Global Literature, and at NYU (2008) where she taught 'Paradigms of Diaspora' (Irish, Jewish, African) and the formation of early NYC. The Mulvihill Collection includes the Lytton Strachey copy of Mary Tighe's Psyche, with Other Poems. Dr Mulvihill is presently at work on Irishwomen's political writings and response pre-1800. Selected online hostings::

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The WB Yeats Society of New York is pleased to acknowledge the handsome notice on this essay posted on the Web site of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), courtesy ILAB site editor Dr Barbara Werner Van Benthem, Stuttgart.

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