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

88 Jack B. Yeats spent his boyhood in Sligo town, a small port on the Atlantic edge. Sligo is flanked in a half circle by mountains which show a wild inland cliff scenery shaped to fantastic form; small lakes, then strong outbursts of rock carry the other flank to the sea. The sea brought the outside world to the doors of a small town in a casual mention of foreign cities, strange words and wild doings; it made for wonder and mystery later seen if only as a gloss on piracy. From the land side came the country people to shop, shy and awkward in the foreign life of a town, but fierce and intractable when following their realistic land calling at fairs and markets. Family life for them centred around the oldest of man’s allegiances, the hearth, woven with memoried legend; their land work built as much on folklore as on the hard reality of uneconomic holdings. The town presented a knowledge of character and incident, the vagaries of personalities with oddities even to the daft accepted as part of its world. It would be an open book like any other Irish town, whose inhabitants are mainly interested in motive and intention of others, in knitting daily events in a conversational form to be related before evening as direct and indirect implication threaded by affection, malice or envy. Here then in his native town, he could see people who were not accepted in a conventional setting. They bore much the same relationship to the tightened security of bourgeois respectability, ringed by experience which it fears to enlarge, as the artist does that to life; and with them the unexpected was always in the offing. The sailor, a transitory form who came on shore for drink and company after the indifference of ocean, forgetful of hardship in his now remembrance of outland ways and customs, to light the imagination of stay-at-homes. Tinkers with the wildness of life in the open and their utterly untamed fierceness who fought after a feed of porter in a whoop of song. Countrymen, freed for a few days in the year from the greedy tyranny of land, wander through their favourite pubs to meet neighbours and relations, ridding themselves of hard-earned money in a spacious generosity; at ease in gestured extravagance with a background of their own song. Outside in the street a ballad singer to relate past and present in a long string of verse, sure of heightened talk and soothing drink before the night came. When the circus arrived its flamboyant posters exalted grace and beauty to ballet level, a band renowned for noise shook the side walls whilst brightly costumed performers wound through the streets. At night, clowns in their tragic way acted the scapegoat, slapped their fellows, made fun of themselves in simulated awkwardness, often to emerge from the chrysalis, as grace. The clown related his humor to the tragic sense of life inherent in his audience, through outsiders, as in the clown, might see only uncaring lightheartedness. Circus music, colour, baroque gesture, essentially sweep the mind, free the heart, but relate nomadic tent existence to settlement, leaving an aching sense of unfulfilment and nostalgia behind. Jack Yeats would be moulded too by the physical nature of his province, Connacht. Great roaring winds sweep in from the Atlantic to drench the land with spray, soften the intention, weaken the will and perseverance. Cloud forms drift slowly in threat or, when storm has ceased, model to a painter’s delight land forms below. Sky bulks large to give a sense of infinite distance and mystery mixed with tragic desolation. This 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. Swirling cloud makes for a Turneresque dramatic effect, difficult to register, shot as it is with daffodil, duck-egg green and improbable colour combinations. Land can become sogged with persistent rain; it is then more than ever a burden and a heart-breaking task to work, or to brood a melancholy in the mind. With shafted light after the rain comes a lyrical mood in which tender greens vibrate in tones, whins crash with yellow glory and atmosphere is radiant. The shifting scene is temperamental and induces mood. It is a hard country to paint as it presents problems of subtle, unrelated colour which is not easily seen as pattern, but develops in a strange orchestration. This subtlety and its opposite, and strongly dramatic sense, must be the despair of academic painters whose minds have been trained to accept the conventional impression, but whose eye may fail to record the sudden unexpected impact. Memory must play its part, for painting hours are episodic, broken by rain or rebellious wind. The sense of man is present in enclosures of light-filigreed stone walls which map land hunger, or in unobtrusive cottages, dwarfed by mountain and hill to an almost tragic insignificance. Beyond the Shannon in a train the West can be sensed; in a spate of talk, an expansion of interest which breaks down impersonal aloofness to introduce the co-operative sharing of a sense of life, an immediate hint of vitality and a degree of wonder which rounds a mediaeval quality of mind. People have charm, time is judged as a convenience not as a burden, talk is an expression in a form of entertainment which interests to free the imagination and give a sense of ease. Subtlety of mind, easily directed to cunning in land or business, is now judged as diplomatic adroitness. Above all is a sense of wildness and freedom, an untamed naturalness, the unexpected even in a phrase, a feeling of equality through an understanding of the natural dignity of man. Jack Yeats experienced some such quality of life in Connacht and he has since interpreted it. With a hawk’s swift eye he has seen this panorama as material, and his sensitive psychological understanding of it has fused its meaning in his spirit. The visual world has been absorbed, selected and re-created slowly with innocent freshness in terms of emotional colour. He can capture the intensity of his feeling which has viewed an aspect of as simple a pleasure of life as the interior of a circus tent. The circus is a boy’s delight but also a man’s, if his emotions have not been smothered by what is known as discretion, or by the death of the heart. There is a genuine interest and affection in his work for the incidents portrayed. They grow out of love and a profound sensibility of what to some are outlandish ways with a certain colourful appeal. The outward form of life has changed since he has grown up but the fundamental attitude of mind remains. Practical people often find life in the West hard; as indeed it is when progress is viewed philosophically in relation to eternity; but artists whose energy is turned to observation see the relationship of people to each other, to events and to their environment. ‘Introduction’ for the Jack B. Yeats National Loan Exhibition Catalogue, National College of Art and Design (Dublin, June-July 1945) By Earnán O’Malley