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 children's books are but a small but fascinating section of the collection of nearly five hundred volumes. There are also reference works, novels of different kinds, books of poetry, and volumes on special topics such as horses, ships, wine, gardening, freemasonry, knots, and entertainment. Works on art are in a minority (illustrated art books of course were not common when Jack B. Yeats was assembling his library) and include artists such as Daumier, Goya, Cruikshank, Ensor, and Renoir.

One of the most exciting aspects of such a diverse archive is the collection of nearly two hundred sketchbooks (figure 2). Jack B. Yeats took a sketchbook with him wherever he went, the typical example measuring 9 x 13 cms and fitting comfortably into his pocket. His abiding theme was Life, and he sketched whatever took his fancy--amusing incidents with colloquialisms jotted down, landscapes with or without people, curious details such as an unusual gate latch. The sketchbooks, carefully dated and noting places visited on the cover, were a form of diary for the artist. He never made studies, and rarely recorded thoughts for subsequent compositions, but very occasionally a sketch has obviously inspired and resembles a picture in image or subject matter. The sketchbooks were his way of analyzing the character of the culture in which he was reared and lived, and a way of practicing its delineation. Ultimately they became a primary source for pictorial inspiration, which he consulted regularly, and from which he drew many late themes.

Over half a century he used his small chronological sketchbooks, generally working in situ with pencil and reinforcing the sketches with pen and wash when he came home. Very occasionally he worked in pure watercolor. Most sketchbooks belong to the earlier period when his painting was largely representational. He sketched in particular areas, London, Liverpool, and various parts of Ireland, returning to his studio--first in Devon, later in Wicklow, then in Dublin--to paint in watercolor and oils a memory of what he had experienced, stimulated by the small images made on the spot.

In the later paintings of course, where his imagination soared by means of metaphor, his practice was to look through the sketchbooks and to develop an image which his memory enhanced consciously and where extra elements were allowed to intrude. The fact that memory itself fascinated him in a surreal way is ascertained from the sketchbooks as well as from the titles of his paintings. Because he parted with some of the small books during his lifetime, notably those recording his journey with J. M. Synge around West Connemara and Mayo, the collection cannot claim to be complete, but it is an immeasurably valuable source for studying Yeats's art and learning to understand it.

The archive is important in the Yeats Museum as material for exhibition as well as for study. One of the museum's policies is to put on display matter that is relevant to the exhibited paintings. For example, during the celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the annual Liffey Swim, the museum exhibited the Olympic medal that Yeats won for his painting of this event when it was in its infancy.