WHYTE'S EXCEPTIONAL IRISH ART MONDAY 7 DECEMBER 2020

74 47 Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) SCULLING, 1912 oil on panel signed lower left; with Daniel Egan framing label and Millar & Beatty labels on reverse; the latter partially obscuring a Charles Chenil & Co. Ltd label inscribed with Yeats’ address [Red Ford House, Greystones, Co. Wicklow]; also with inscribed Galerie F. E. Buffa, Paris label and another incomplete, unidentified exhibition label on reverse 9.50 by 13.75in. (24.1 by 34.9cm) Frame Size: 13.5 by 18in. (34.3 by 45.7cm) Condition: This work appears to be in excellent condition. The panel is stable and the surface is clean. There are no signs of cracking or flaking. Provenance: Chenil Gallery, London; Collection of John Vanston by 1914; Galerie F.E. Buffa, Paris circa 1940s Private collection, Bordeaux; Bordeaux Chartrons-Bordeaux Enchères, 8 July, 2020, lot 462; Private collection Exhibited: Allied Artists, London, 1912; ’Pictures of life in the West of Ireland’, Mills Hall, Dublin, 23 February to 7 March 1914, no. 30; Galerie F.E Buffa, Paris, under the title ‘A la Godille’ €200,000-€300,000 (£177,780-£266,670 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot47 Literature: Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Andre Deutsch, London, 1992, Vol. I, page 31, catalogue no. 32 Yeats painted this oil on panel in 1912, and presented it in London the same year at the “Allied Artists” exhibition. It was sold two years later to John Vanston during an exhibition in Dublin. This collector was the father of Doreen Vanston (1903-1988), another Irish painter, who was a member of The White Stag Group in the 1940s. Yeats stayed in Roundstone in Co. Galway in the summer of 1911 and painted several oil paintings based on the landscape and scenery that he encountered there. He was fascinated by the different styles of fishing boats and their journeys around the rocky landscape of the coast. He was beginning to work primarily in oil, moving away from his earlier use of watercolour. As can be seen in this painting he had perfected his early technique of using thick impasto oil paint to construct concise but powerful images of contemporary Irish life. The waves and clouds are tinted in pink tones with flecks of red and blues. The boat and its sailor are outlined in black. The painting shows a young man standing at the stern of a wooden rowing boat. He holds a long oar in his hands and looks behind taking care of where he is steering the craft. As the title suggests the man is sculling which means that he is propelling the boat with a scull,