Artist Details

Jack Yeats

(1871 – 1957)

Ireland hasn’t produced many artists who get mentioned internationally. One who does rate in surveys of 20th century art is Jack B. Yeats (1871 – 1957). For instance, his painting ‘Waiting for the Long Car’ (c. 1948) is included in Phaidon’s best-selling ‘The 20th Century Art Book’.

The Ross Fine Art summer exhibition includes an Indian ink sketch by Jack B. called ‘Tin Can Racing’. He wrote - ‘‘I have a new game ...Tin Can Racing on a sandy shore. All you want is a gale of wind blowing parallel with the sea, and round tin cans: cocoa tins are good, but golden syrup tins, if they have a rim on either end, are best, and keep a better course than all the others. Whack a hole through each end of the tin, pass a stick through so that it sticks out a foot at either end, and thread some paper sails on the stuck out stick - then launch your tin before the wind.”

The 28th March past was the 50th anniversary of Jack B’s death in Dublin.

T.G. Rosenthal, in his book ‘The Art of Jack B. Yeats’, notes among the highlights of the artist’s life a trip to Donegal in 1912. Hilary Pyle mentions his sketches then of “rocky prominences about Bunbeg and Dunfanaghy” and that he saw the landscape artist Henry Lamb in Bunbeg “although as always with other artists Yeats seems to have kept his distance”. It’s known that Yeats also ventured into Donegal while on his regular trips back to Sligo, where he grew up.

A Yeats painting from 1922, ‘Off the Donegal coast’, bought from the artist’s studio for around the £250 mark the following year, is in the collection of the Crawford art gallery in Cork.