Yeats, Jack B.

Yeats, Jack B. (1871–1957), painter of genre scenes and subject pictures, usually regarded as the most important Irish painter of his generation. The son of the painter John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) and brother of William Butler Yeats, he was brought up in Sligo, but educated at the South Kensington, Chiswick, and Westminster schools of art in London. In 1888, in London, he began working as an illustrator on numerous journals, but in 1897 moved to Devon and began painting in watercolours and, later, in oils. In 1905 he toured the west of Ireland gathering material for illustrations to Synge's The Aran Islands, and in 1910 settled permanently in Ireland. Thereafter he exhibited regularly in Dublin and occasionally in London, New York, and elsewhere. He was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916. Typically Yeats worked from what he termed ‘a pool of memories’, from 1915 till the early 1920s recording many of the momentous events taking place in Ireland. In the mid‐1920s he turned his attention upon the inner world of thoughts and feelings, but his subject matter was still drawn from the life around him. An individualist, his work from the 1930s and later became increasingly Expressionist in technique, his imagery enigmatic in appearance but often conveying an intense humanity.

Bibliography

Arnold, Bruce , Jack Yeats (1998)

S. B. Kennedy