JACK B. YEATS, R.H.A. | THE SHOWGROUND REVISITED

Purchased from Waddington Galleries, Montreal, 1961, by Dr and Mrs N. Epstein;

Private collection, Rhode Island, U.S.A.;

Theo Waddington Fine Art, London, 2004

Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Vol. II., Andre Deutsch, London, 1992, no.1059, p.961;

Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Biography, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1970, p. 165, pl.29

This late painting by Jack B. Yeats deals with a familiar theme – the travelling fair. A solitary figure stands in an empty fairground. He holds his hat on one hand, and his right hand to his face in a dramatic gesture. His head is held aloft as he surveys the distance. He appears to be about to deliver a grand soliloquy.

Behind him the setting is ambiguous. To the right a structure encloses the space. Across the background a line of white forms suggests canvas awnings or distant mountains. The capricious looking ground, on which the figure stands, is made up of a myriad of colours – blue, yellow, red, pink, green. The pigment appears to randomly cover the surface of the canvas, which is left bare and clearly visible in parts. By contrast the figure is made up of thick impasto paint, blues, reds and whites, that make him appear both solid and ghostly.

The subject of the deserted showground, a place usually full of stalls, dealers, players and crowds of people relates to other late paintings of Yeats. These include The Great Tent has Collapsed (1947, Private Collection ) in which the circus tent has blown away leaving the ringmaster and a bystander standing in the void. In The Night Has Gone (1947, Private Collection) a lone male figure stands amid an expansive desolate landscape. The showground is the site of temporary events. Its emptiness evokes feelings of nostalgia and loss, as well as expectation and hope for future manifestations of excitement and activity associated with this special place.

Hilary Pyle has attributed this subject of revisiting old haunts to the death of Cottie Yeats, the artist’s wife and close companion of over fifty years, in 1947. This event prompted Yeats to reflect on his own mortality and his isolation. The subject also has more universal connotations of existentialism in which the individual must overcome the purposelessness of his or her existence by shaping out their own aim in life. Yeats creates a metaphor for this idea not only in the subject of the figure in the abandoned arena but through the construction of the painting itself. The materiality of the work is dominant. Paint is thinly applied in parts to reveal the canvas, while elsewhere thick oil pigment is used to construct form. The physicality of the surface and the ambiguity of the forms prompts the viewer to actively engage in completing the meaning of the work for themselves. 

We are grateful to Dr. Róisín Kennedy for kindly preparing this catalogue entry.