To be loved as a cupboard: the Yeats Museum in the National Gallery of Ireland

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Fall-Winter, 2001 by Hilary Pyle

The original collection of Jack B. Yeats paintings and drawings was built up in the National Gallery of Ireland from his lifetime to the present day, mainly though the munificence of donors, and occasionally by direct purchase. Two-thirds of the works have come into the national collection as bequests or gifts, and the museum continues to be dependent on such generosity. But if small--thirty-four paintings in all--the collection is excellent, ranging from his oil panel The Priest, painted in 1913 as illustration to George Birmingham's Irishmen All, to the powerful late canvas Grief, of 1951, in which conjuring up a small Irish town, the artist expresses his abhorrence of war. The Dublin-inspired compositions in the collection, besides playing a major part thematically, form an interesting sequence in demonstrating the artist's stylistic development. The Liffey Swim, In the Lucan Tram, and The Beggarman in the Shop are evidence of the gradual loosening of his narrative manner, while he still maintained lucid forms and handled pigment conventionally.

In Islandbridge Regatta (1925), Yeats has broken from "line's confines" as he put it (front cover). His need to express the elusive inner life becomes immediately apparent. The competitive sport, enacted in the river and surveyed from the bank, now has a mythological aspect, while emphasis is laid on the vaguely defined figures in the foreground, and on the dominant golden-haired youth, who will henceforth become a symbol of the continual renewal of life in Yeats's paintings. Light and dark, morning and evening assist his subsequent metaphors of life in the city, here calling up the mystery of his studio as day dwindles, there revealing the wakening heart of the Dublin business world.

There are a number of Sligo and West of Ireland subjects in the collection, too, and images of circus and theatre, which group together appropriately. The late individualistic poetic works pick up the early earthy themes, elevating them to a metaphysical plane. The Singing Horseman (1949), a striking uplifting image, infused with light and color, is predictably one of the most popular of these paintings.

Recent acquisitions include the small panel A Morning, formerly in the collection of writer Samuel Beckett, an admirer of Yeats who was obliged to borrow to purchase the painting, and the 1945 oil And So My Brother Hail and Farewell for Evermore (figure 1). In this, the artist celebrates and mourns the departed (the widespread casualties of war as well as his own personal bereavements) while coming to terms with the ephemerality of life represented in the fleeting symbol of a seabird passing by. Man and bird are united for a moment as transient beings in the enveloping seascape.

The Yeats Museum occupies a tall, spacious environment originally designed to house Archbishop Marsh's Library. (6) Before its recent conversion, this area was home to the National Portraits and then to the Icon and Early Italian Collections. In such ample space, it is possible to hang almost all the oils at one time, with a few works on loan and the watercolors and works on paper on a system of rotation: though recently we are hanging more economically so as to give more room to such complex paintings. (7) It also has been possible to mount two mini-exhibitions in the museum to mark the millennium, one highlighting Yeats's many horse paintings, the other showing the progress of conservation work on the Jack B. Yeats Archive.