Jack B. Yeats, R.H.A.

Galway, Kenny Art Gallery, Paintings and Drawings, 1976, no.3

Jack B. Yeats, The Charmed Life, Routledge, London, 1938, pp.58-9;
Hilary Pyle, Jack Butler Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Vol.II., Andre Deutsch, London, 1992, no.1162, p.1064, illustrated

The board appears sound and the work in excellent original condition with rich passages of impasto. Under ultraviolet light there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held under glass in a gilt plaster frame; unexamined out of frame. Ready to hang.
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This delightful painting depicts a young golden-haired child playing at being a runaway horse. He holds his fists out in front as if trying to control the invisible animal. His face is set with a concentrated expression, as his imagination carries him off to the world of make-believe. The loose strokes of highly coloured paint suggest the fast movement of the figure and distort his facial features as if the force of speed had physically transformed them. The blues, greens, yellows and pinks of his head and body are echoed in the surrounding shrubbery and vegetation. Distant mountains of blue mark the distant horizon and suggest an expansive landscape evocative of possibilities and times to come.

Yeats depicted children playing as animals in other works including Playing Horses (1945, Private Collection) and the work on paper, Donkey, Hare and Hounds (1910, Private Collection). Children, like animals, are privileged entities in his work, as in that of other artists. Their intuitiveness, innocence and sensitivity heighten their perception of the world, an idea that Yeats emphasises in the exuberant way in which he paints them. Equally children, at least in the imagination of Yeats, are unpredictable and vivacious. They spurn the conventional manners of adulthood and, like the tinkers and ballad singers of his other paintings, are outsiders to society.

Hilary Pyle has suggested that the child’s golden hair ‘proclaims his symbolic role for the artist’ and his freedom to create and imagine are akin to that of the painter or the writer (Hilary Pyle, op. cit., p.1064). The figure appears in A Westerly Wind (1921, Private Collection). In later works such as Tinkers’ Encampment. Blood of Abel (1940, Private Collection), Above the Fair (1946, National Gallery of Ireland) and Grief (1951, National Gallery of Ireland) the golden-haired child takes on a religious connotation, evoking the Christ child who intercedes between humanity and its creator, or between humanity and the cosmos. Here, in one of Yeats’s last paintings, the boy recalls the energy and imagination of childhood. The strong impasto colours and dynamic setting equally convey the brevity of life and the intoxicating impact on one’s memory of such youthful moments.

Dr. Róisín Kennedy