WHYTE'S in association with CHRISTIE'S - The Ernie O'Malley Collection MONDAY 25 November 2019

46 0 Ernie O’Malley met Jack B. Yeats in Dublin at the home of the art enthusiast and historian Constantine Curran in 1937. The two became friends, meeting and corresponding regularly. Both were interested in art, literature and theatre. Yeats was broadly sympathetic to O’Malley’s republican outlook and shared his ambivalent attitude to the conservative nature of post- independence Ireland. Above all the two men had a love of the Irish landscape, especially the West, where both had spent their childhood, O’Malley in Mayo and Yeats in Sligo. Their correspondence makes frequent reference to the people and places of Clew Bay, where O’Malley was then living. O’Malley was already acquainted with Yeats’ work. In The Singing Flame, his account of the Civil War, he relates how, when stationed in the Four Courts, O’Malley found that ‘a piece of artillery [had] gone through [one of his books], a John Synge illustrated by Jack Yeats’. 1 This was presumably a copy of Synge’s Aran Islanders, illustrated by Jack B. Yeats. In the late 1930s, after his return to Ireland from seven years in the United States and Mexico, O’Malley frequented exhibitions at the Royal Hibernian Academy and at the newly opened Contemporary Picture Galleries where he could not have missed seeing the work of Yeats. He wrote enthusiastically of his paintings to Thomas MacGreevy, the poet and critic, and close friend of Yeats. O’Malley became an important collector of Yeats’ work. Between 1939 and 1945 he acquired eight paintings by the artist, astutely assembling a representative range, with a preference for his later style. 2 Most were bought directly fromYeats and paid for in instalments as was the practice of many of the artist’s clients in this period. O’Malley’s first acquisition was Death for Only One (1937), followed by The Band, Dungarvan (1925, Private Collection); Paper Bags for Hats (1925, Private Collection), Derrynane (1927, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Quinnipiac University), Evening in Sligo (1937), Reverie (1931), Homage to Bret Harte (1943, Private Collection) and The Fighting Dawn (1945). He also owned several of Yeats’ sketchbooks, which were presented to him by the artist in 1945. In addition, Helen O’Malley acquired nine of Yeats’ works. O’Malley encouraged the international development of Yeats’ reputation, bringing Sir John Rothenstein, the Director of the Tate Gallery to meet the artist in his Dublin studio in 1945. As a result, the Tate acquired Two Travellers, one of Yeats’major paintings in 1946, and subsequently staged an exhibition of his work in 1948. O’Malley was an active committee member of the Jack B. Yeats National Loan Exhibition, a major retrospective of the artist’s work held at the National College of Art, Kildare Street, Dublin, in the summer of 1945. It comprised 180 paintings, including several lent by Ernie and Helen O’Malley, and was visited by over 20, 000 people. Opened by the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, it received much publicity and established Yeats as the country’s leading modern artist. O’Malley wrote the essay for the National Loan Exhibition catalogue, one of the most influential texts published on Yeats in the artist’s lifetime. It reveals both an intimate knowledge of the artist’s practice and an innate curiosity into the decisions and factors that impact on the production of his paintings. O’Malley notes how Yeats was able to express an intense response to the Irish landscape through the medium of paint. The visual world has been absorbed, selected and re- created slowly with innocent freshness in terms of emotional colour. O’Malley identifies the West of Ireland as the source of Yeats’ distinctive aesthetic. He equates the exhilarating character of Yeats’ paintings to the temperamental and mood inducing scenery of this part of the country, which had come to represent an idealised Ireland in the minds of many Irishmen and women. Sky bulks large to give a sense of infinite distance and mystery mixed with tragic desolation. The spaciousness of sky is the most noticeable feature of the Western scene; it is, at times, as if the land were a prelude to the atmosphere above. It is this wild and uncultivated landscape, O’Malley argues, that evokes the ‘sense of wildness and freedom’ to be found in Yeats’ work. Not only the landscape but the people who inhabit the West are crucial to understanding Yeats’ painting and its relevance to modern Ireland. O’Malley characterises them as having ‘an untamed naturalness … a feeling of equality through an understanding of the natural dignity of man’. Yeats’ representation of Irish life as imaginative and egalitarian reflects the type of community which exists, or was imagined to exist, in the West. Yeats’ choice of figures – tramps, tinkers or strolling players – reflects his negative attitude to the ‘tightened bourgeois respectability’ of post-independence Ireland, according to O’Malley. He chose to people his West of Ireland with outsiders, free to journey across the landscape, removed from the constraints of society. This potent vision of Ireland was acclaimed by O’Malley and widely admired by those who shared this utopian belief in a distinctive Irish life and culture. 3 Subsequently O’Malley wrote of how the ‘essential poetry and vitality [of Yeats’ work], the evocative nuances of his suggestive and implied colour and his progressive changes in method created a standard judgment for onlookers’. 4 O’Malley’s essay also draws attention to the darker aspects of Yeats’ work, particularly in the later paintings. In these, Yeats’ figures, according to O’Malley, enter a subjective world in which they ‘are related to the loneliness of the individual soul, the vague lack of pattern in living with its sense of inherent tragedy, Ernie O’Malley and Jack B. Yeats