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

80 A tramp stands gazing down on a corpse. His face is obscured but his hands are folded in a gesture of reverence or of mourning. He seems to possess nothing. His clothes are ragged and he carries nothing. The title suggests his isolation in the face of his companion’s death, while equally evoking the concrete acceptance of mortality in the context of the wide expanse of vibrant nature in which the scene is enacted. The dead body below him is stretched out across the rich green bogland. Its head is thrown back and its eyes, still open, seem to gaze at the world around it. Its body is formed out of strokes of marbled paint that appear incongruous and ephemeral in contrast to the solidity of the impasto of its face. Behind and around the two figures a vast landscape extends. The scene takes place on an open cliff- top, with the darkened sea and dramatic cloud strewn sky dominating the background. O’Malley spoke of the way in which the sky gives ‘a sense of infinite distance and mystery mixed with tragic desolation’. Yeats wrote that he considered the work to be ‘an important picture’, and described both figures as tramps, noting the dark sea and sky. (1) O’Malley first saw the painting on a visit to Yeats in 1939, when he stated that he ‘fell clear in love with the picture and felt I must have it’. (2) He acquired the work immediately fromYeats, as his first Yeats painting, paying for it in instalments. The painting, considered to be one of Yeats’most important works, was subsequently exhibited at the National Gallery, London in 1942 and in the Jack B. Yeats National Loan Exhibition in 1945. Hilary Pyle has written that the composition suggests the period of the Troubles in Ireland, and that this may have attracted Ernie O’Malley’s interest in the painting. (3) Dr. Róisín Kennedy September 2019 1 . Letter of Jack B. Yeats to Thomas MacGreevy , April 1939, TCD Ms. 8105/31. 2 . Letter of Ernie O’Malley to Thomas MacGreevy, 1 May 1939, TCD MS. 8117/3. 3 . Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Andre Deutsch, 1992, I, p.451. €400,000-€600,000 (£350,880-£526,320 approx.) Click Here for Large Images & To Bid Lot 35