WHYTE'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 29 NOVEMBER 2021 AT 6PM

53 IMPORTANT IRISH ART MONDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2021 AT 6PM This epic painting has been described by Hilary Pyle as ‘one of the artist’s finest achievements in these late visionary paintings’. 1 Shouting is one of a handful of works that Jack Yeats painted in the large 40 by 60 inch format. Others include There is No Night (1949, Hugh Lane Gallery), Grief, (1951, National Gallery of Ireland, ) and My Beautiful, My Beautiful, (1953, Private Collection). The large scale and greater ratio of height to width which these paintings have, according to Bruce Arnold, makes the viewer aware of ‘a larger vision, a greater sense of grand design and universal purpose’. 2 Yeats used this larger format only in some of his very late works, after 1945. Shouting was exhibited at Waddington’s Gallery in Dublin in 1953 along with The Violence of the Dawn and several other works as well as at exhibitions in the United States, London and Paris and was later included in the major centenary exhibition of Yeats’ birth at the National Gallery of Ireland in 1971. Shouting depicts three boisterous companions cavorting on an open expanse of bogland. It brings together diverse memories, including figures and motifs fromYeats’ earlier paintings and illustrations, but does so in a daring and extravagant manner. The figures are dressed in flamboyant and colourful costumes. Hilary Pyle identifies them as a seaman (on the left in a peaked hat), a jockey (in the centre with a long black cloak and white jodhpurs), and a ballad singer (on the right). Behind them to the right is a tent in which an old man can be seen peering out at the noise and spectacle provided by his neighbours. This figure is cocooned in his embryonic shelter and acts as a foil to the expansive dramatic group in the foreground of the painting. The men shout to the elements, their mouths open and their heads tilted back. The jockey raises his arm in the air in a gesture of exhilaration. The figures are made of thick and tenuous conglomerations of paint in which their features appear ready to dissolve into the surface of the canvas. Their voices evoke the fragility of their existence, perched as they appear to be on the surface of the world with nothing to anchor them in the desolate landscape, nor protect them from the open sea and the massive expanse of sky that surrounds them. The scale of the work enables Yeats to devote a large proportion of the composition to the sky. This is painted in diverse textures and brushstrokes. On the left, from where the morning light emanates, the paint is applied in yellow and white impasto. The fall of sunlight across the land and figures is articulated in patches of bright yellow that can be seen on the ground, on the left-hand side of the men, and even on the old man in his shelter. In contrast other parts of the sky are barely painted with thin layers of grey and blue paint on the upper right-hand side of the composition through which the surface of the canvas can be seen. A dark grey form suggests a gathering storm cloud that ominously overshadows the tent. Swirls of blue enliven the firmament, accentuating the sense of movement and dynamism that pervades the entire surface of the painting. The work, like Yeats’ other great paintings, evokes both a profound sense of optimism and an appreciation of the precariousness of the human condition. These contradictory ideas are directly reflected in the way in which the painting has been made, with forms oscillating between thick and concrete elements to light and delicate facets. Dr Róisín Kennedy, September 2021 Hilary Pyle writes: Three characters fromYeats’ earlier drawings and paintings are brought together in a mood of happy exultation. A seaman, a jockey and a ballad singer, who have emerged from a barrel-topped whiskey tent (a typical feature of the early race meeting portrayed by Yeats) shout their joy to the sky, and the whole landscape responds in rich eloquent colouring. The painting is one of the artist’s finest achievements in these late visionary landscapes” Dr Róisín Kennedy, September 2021 1) Hilary Pyle Jack B. Yeats. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Andre Deutsch, 1992, II, p. 969 2) B. Arnold, Jack Yeats, Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 311-13.