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

Housed for the moment in a temporary location during conservation and cataloguing, the archive divides into three distinct areas: the artist's library; his sketchbooks; and a collection of manuscripts, scrapbooks, and boxes filled with miscellany amassed by him throughout his life. Jack Yeats was by nature a beachcomber; these last illuminate his subject matter and explain his methods of working.

Yeats had a rough system of storage for easy reference. Smaller objects were grouped in brown envelopes on which the contents were listed, sometimes with a sketch, or, in later years, with his distinctive monogram. Shirt boxes and other convenient receptacles coped with many of the larger or more awkwardly shaped mementos, such as old journals and outsize publications, the medals he won, as well as corks and other bits and pieces that might be of use in the construction of the toy boats he loved to make. He used scrapbooks to preserve images stamped on orange papers, newspaper pictures, and so on--a method he developed for boosting his memory. Maps, timetables, and cuttings fill several discarded Ancient Irish Vellum boxes, which originally held the writing paper made at Saggart Mills, which supplied the paper for the Dun Emer and Cuala Presses.

One idiosyncratic habit was to cut out the inner pages of an old leather-bound volume (Paley's Principles of Moral & Political Philosophy, for example), and to insert drawings and prints of his own. The images were safe, hidden from any eyes but his own; preserving them within such "proper" symbols of the past not only gave Jack Yeats the unexpected context he desired, but must have appealed to his sense of humor as well.

When his niece Anne inherited his archive, she was faced with the task of sorting the enormous quantity of memorabilia, not all by any means stored so neatly as might appear from the above, and she adopted a comparable system for what was not already boxed. Letters were placed in files. She made parcels out of material that was previously shelved or inadequately stored, grouping similar matter together where possible, and numbering and indexing parcels to make them accessible for purposes of the scholars who visited her.

Manuscripts for his plays, catalogues of the artist's exhibitions, press cuttings, advertisements with striking images or phraseology, personal records and indexes, Victorian miniature plays, programs of sporting events, playbills, postcards, and photographs were all gathered together in the same way. These parcels were then numbered and stored in a large wooden trunk until they came into the National Gallery.

From the artist's extensive library Anne selected the books of major importance, keeping all that bore the artist's signature, or some other mark of particular interest. She kept all of Jack's own publications, and family books. Besides some of Cottie's books (his wife Mary Cottenham Yeats, known as Cottie, admired W. B. Yeats's writings and collected his early first editions), there are a few volumes originally in the possession of Lily Yeats, whose effects Jack (as the sole surviving member of the family) had to disperse when she died. Jack himself was interested in historic children's books and kept Aunt Friendly's Nursery Book, illustrated with thirty-six pages of Kronheim colored plates (a Christmas gift from his mother in 1875). Among other findings in his library are a number of Randolph Caldecott's picture books, Mrs. Hoffland's William and his Uncle Ben (in a new edition of the 1830s given to him by Cottie), and the Cabinet of Useful Arts and Manufacturers (1821), originally belonging to the youthful Thomas Collins whose name is inscribed in it, and bought nearly a century later by the artist on the Dublin Quays.