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Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
LOCAL AND TRAVELLING CHAMPIONS, DEVONSHIRE, 1897
watercolour, black chalk and pencil on paper
signed lower left; with Waddington Galleries labels on reverse
14 x 10in. (35.56 x 25.40cm)
Provenance:
Waddington Galleries, London;
From where acquired by Mr & Mrs F. Hess, London;
Sotheby’s, 18 May 2000, lot 140;
Private collection
Exhibited:
‘Jack B. Yeats, Watercolour Sketches’, Clifford Gallery, London, November 1897, catalogue no.15;
’Jack B. Yeats: Early watercolours’, The Waddington Galleries, London, 6-29 April 1961, catalogue no.23 (illus-
trated in black and white);
’Jack B. Yeats: Amongst Friends’, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, 9 September -14 Octo-
ber 2004, catalogue no. 46, p.120 (illustrated in colour p.121);
’Father and Son: Paintings, watercolours and drawings by John Butler Yeats and Jack Butler Yeats’, Theo and
Vivienne Waddington’s Irish Art Project at 5a Cork Street, London, 5-30 May 2009
Literature:
Pyle, Hilary, Jack B. Yeats: His Watercolours, Drawings and Pastels, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1993,
no.71, p.66 (illustrated in black and white);
Arnold, Bruce, Jack Yeats, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998, p.69 (illustrated in black and
white fig.71)
Yeats was living in Devon when he painted this work, having moved there from London with his wife Cottie
in 1895. It is one of several scenes of local fairs and markets that he produced before moving his focus to the
West of Ireland in 1898.
A tall thin man in a blue jacket approaches a man at a boxing booth. The title of the work, Local and Travel-
ling Champions suggest that the stall’s main attraction was pitching its champions against local contenders.
The pair of boxing gloves hanging from the roof also indicates that visitors were welcome to try their luck
in the ring. Paintings of boxing fights are prominently displayed above the entrance. One boxer, Sullivan, is
named. The large rattle in the proprietor’s hand was used to attract the crowds to the booth. Beyond to the
right a competing attraction, ‘the petrified man’ is advertised.
Yeats sketched boxing matches and travelling fairs endlessly in the early decades of his career. They provided
opportunities to observe the performers and the crowds. His keen sense of the types of character that fre-
quented such events is evident in the stance and expression of the stall holder. With his flat cap pulled down
over his eyes, his patterned necktie, and his hand thrust in his pocket he appears both shrewd and shifty.
The painting was included in one of Yeats’s first one-man shows, at the Clifford Gallery in London in 1897.
Dr Róisín Kennedy
April 2016
€15,000-€20,000 (£11,810-£15,750 approx.)
Large Image & Place Bid Lot 28