Yeats, Jack Butler

Yeats, Jack Butler (1871–1957). The best-known Irish painter of the 20th century, born in London, the son of John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), a barrister who became an unremarkable but successful portrait painter, and brother of the celebrated poet William Butler Yeats. He had an idyllic childhood in Sligo, his ancestral home on the north-west coast of Ireland, and studied at various art schools in London, notably Westminster School of Art under Fred Brown. From 1910 he lived in Dublin. Early in his career he worked mainly as an illustrator; he did his first oil paintings in about 1897 (the year of his first one-man exhibition in London), but he did not work regularly in the medium until about 1905. The subjects he painted included Celtic myth and everyday Irish life (including scenes of fairs and horse races), and through these he contributed to the upsurge of nationalist feeling in the arts that accompanied the movement for Irish independence. His early work as a painter was influenced by the French Impressionist pictures he saw in the collection of Hugh Lane, but in the 1920s he developed a more personal Expressionist style characterized by high-keyed colour and extremely loose brushwork (there is some similarity to the work of Kokoschka, who became a great friend in the last decade of Yeats's life). Yeats has many admirers, but some critics think that his late paintings often degenerate into a muddy mess. He was immensely prolific, producing more than 1,000 paintings and a great many drawings. His work is represented in numerous galleries in Ireland, notably the National Gallery and the Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern art in Dublin and the Sligo County Museum and Art Gallery, which has material relating also to his father and brother. There are also numerous examples in the USA, where he has long been popular. Yeats was a writer as well as a painter—the author of several plays, novels, and volumes of poetry, as well as Life in the West of Ireland (1912) and Sligo (1930).