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WHYTES
SINCE 1783
,
19
S
I
1
20
Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
A BOREEN
watercolour on artist board
signed lower left
10 by 14in. (25.40 by 35.56cm)
Provenance:
American Art Galleries, New York, 9 February, 1927, lot 39B;
Private collection
Exhibited:
Sketches of Life in the West of Ireland, Central Hall, 1903,
catalogue no. 19
Literature:
Pyle, Hilary, Jack B. Yeats: His watercolours Drawings and Pastels,
Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1993, no. 441, p. 120
A Boreen was exhibited at Jack Yeats’ Sketches of Life in the West of
Ireland exhibition in Dublin in 1902 and is mentioned in contemporary
reviews of the show. It depicts a young boy on a donkey riding along a
narrow boreen between dry stone walls towards a group of thatched
cottages. A view of the sea is visible in the distance beyond.This is a
classic Yeats composition, of the type that he was to develop in his later
oil paintings.The boy looks back towards the viewer, his face
silhouetted against the distinctive landscape of the West of Ireland to
which he belongs. His dark steady gaze and set features counteract
negative stereotypical images of the Irish peasant that permeated
visual representations of the Irish throughout the later 19th century.
Yeats subtly brings in his knowledge of contemporary design in the
carefully delineated structure of the walls and in the narrow undulating
form of the tree that severs the composition. Both are indebted to Art
Nouveau and to Japanese prints. Still perceptible are the strong purples
and greens that characterised Yeats’ watercolours of this period. Such
modern and stylised imagery of rural Ireland enthralled contemporary
commentators especially those concerned with the creation of a new
image of Irish life.The painting was acquired soon after it was painted
by John Quinn, the New York attorney, who was a close friend of the
Yeats family and a key patron of modernist art and literature.
Dr. Róisín Kennedy
October 2014
€
15,000-
€
20,000 (£12,000-£16,000 approx)