WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 6 JUNE 2022 AT 6PM

60 43 Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) MY FRIEND BENEATH THE SEA, 1924 oil on panel signed lower right 9 by 14in. (22.9 by 35.6cm) Frame Dimensions: 17 by 22in. (43.2 by 55.9cm) Provenance: Sold to W. M. Glynn, Waterford, 1943; Private collection; Bonham’s, 1 July 2020, lot 39; Private collection Exhibited: ‘Pictures of Life in the West of Ireland’, Engineers’ Hall, Dublin, 27 March to 8 April 1924, catalogue no. 9; ’Pictures of Irish Life’, Tooth, London, 12 March to 4 April 1925, catalogue no. 7; ’Later Work’, Contemporary Picture Galleries, Dublin, 27 October to 8 November 1941, catalogue no. 13; ’Loan Exhibition’, Municipal Gallery, Waterford, 26 June to 10 July 1965, catalogue no. 13; ’Jack B. Yeats: Painting & Memory’, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 4 September 2021 to 6 February 2022 Literature: Pyle, Hilary, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné Of The Oil Paintings, André Deutsch, London, 1992, Vol. I, No. 234, p. 209 This delightful oil depicts a nude man swimming beneath the surface of green sea water. The frothy white of the waves are visible above his head. His right arm stretches out while his legs are curled up beneath his body, as if about to be kicked back behind him. The murky surface of the ground below is suggested by broad thick strokes of dark greens and blues. The body of the man appears weightless and strangely vulnerable in this peculiar environment. His hair is swept back by the tide and his eyes are open as he propels himself forward through the cloudy water. The viewpoint is upwards revealing the chest and face of the swimmer. Hilary Pyle believes the work is based on a memory that Yeats had of swimming with a friend in Sligo as a younger man. He later made a sketch of the composition along with that of The Bar (1925, Private Collection) and Singing the Last Rose of Summer (1929, Private Collection) which he kept in his studio, possibly as an exercise in memory. (1) The painting was first exhibited in one of Yeats’s Life in the West of Ireland exhibitions in Dublin in 1924. It was described as ‘bizarre’, and ‘a most ingenious impression of a submerged swimmer’ by one critic. (2) The show also included a similar subject, Old Men Bathing, (1922, Private Collection) (3) which shows two men wading out into the Atlantic. As an adult, Yeats recalled how, ‘Almost every year of my boyhood some friend, or myself stepped too soon into the creaming edge of the Atlantic’. (4) He depicted bathers in several early watercolour paintings such as A Sunday Morning Sligo (1898, Private Collection) and in a number of later oils including The Bather at the Point Sligo, (1925, Private Collection), The Old Bathing Place, (1943, Private Collection) and The Spring Board, (1952, Private Collection.) Dr Roísín Kennedy May 2022 1. Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats. A Catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings, I, p. 209. 2. Irish Times, 28 March 1924, p.4. 3. Sold at Whyte’s as lot 31, 26 February 2018, for €50,000. 4. Jack B. Yeats quoted in Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats. His Watercolours, Drawings and Pastels, Irish Academic Press, 1993, p. 71. €40,000-€60,000 (£34,190-£51,280 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot43