Jack B. Yeats
1871-1957
Artist

Privately [Jack B.] Yeats is something of an enigma, in spite of the gentle magnetism of his personality, his reputation as a host, and his apparent geniality and accessibility to all sorts and conditions of people. He was not an intellectual, though he drew intellectuals to him; neither was he a socialite, extrovert and bon viveur as Orpen was; yet people of all sorts liked him and sought him out. Unlike Hone, Jellett, Osborne and so many others, he did not have pupils, and few people ever watched him at work. Private but sociable, a dreamer and fantasist, yet no fool in money and professional matters; a man whose talk always drew listeners but who was not a wit or a conversationalist; a bohemian among the bourgeoisie, and a bourgeois among bohemians, he seems as elusive to pin down in his life as he is in his art. In later life, W.B. Yeats's hieratic airs and increasing social snobbery repelled or inhibited many younger people who were drawn to him as a writer, while Jack Yeats seems to have been remembered with affection by virtually all who encountered him personally.

The early watercolours have charm and an intimate lyricism, the mass of illustrative work he turned out, both in colour and black-and-white, always had a kind of broad, popular balladeering vitality, and certain relatively early paintings such as Bachelor's Walk (1913) have their firm place in the national mythology. Yet much of the earlier work is also opaque and almost monotonous in colour, and there is still rather too strong a flavour of the illustrator, as if he remained tied too much to traditional genre subjects or to the imaginative world of his literary contemporaries.

From the early 1920s his style began to change into a kind of highly charged, moody intimisme, romantic yet based on everyday observation, exemplified by such works as In the Tram and The Liffey Swim. Over the next few years his colour began to grow markedly more luminous and expressive - almost Expressionist, in fact - and his brushwork grew correspondingly freer, so that the paint-strokes created and moulded his forms rather than merely followed them. This development grew steadily stronger over the next two decades, until the typical, mature Yeats canvas was enriched with impastoes, sudden highlights, slashes of pure colour, and with figures, shapes and faces which emerged or half emerged suggestively from an iridescent mist of paint.

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