WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 29 MAY 2023 AT 6PM

40 This late visionary work of Jack B. Yeats depicts a woman reclining in the landscape. She raises herself from the ground and extends her right arm in an exaggerated manner. She points towards a songbird which stands on the topmost branch of a tree, its neck extended and its beak open skywards as it fills the air with its music. The woman’s face is in profile and her closed eyes convey an expression of complete rapture as she listens to the singing of the thrush. Her serpentine pose, in which she looks over her shoulder, suggests that she has been aroused from her sleep by the mesmerising sound of the bird. The highly theatrical posture of the figure is reminiscent of a modern dancer or a classical actress. Her flamboyant appearance and strange gesturing make it appear that she is in abeyance to the bird, prostrate in the face of its splendour. The long dark hair, dangling gold earring and exotic costume of the woman suggest that she is a gypsy or travelling player who has come to rest in this wild location. She is the female equivalent of the wandering men found in so many of Yeats works, most notably the youth in The Singing Horseman, (1949, National Gallery if Ireland). She lies in a tree-lined bower contained by the vertical trunks of saplings that form a protective palisade of blues and reds which opens to a sky of blue and yellow. The colours of her dress; blue, white, pink and gold are enhanced by those of the flowers and plants of this lush setting. This part of the composition recalls those of other late paintings most notably A Rose Among Many Waters, (1952, Private Collection). The subject of a figure enthralled by a bird is also reminiscent of Yeats’s A Blackbird Singing in Tir na Nóg (1943, Private Collection). In this a child gazes upon a bird as it bathes in a rock pool in the midst of a lush and verdant landscape. The painting was exhibited at the RHA in Dublin in 1951 when its resemblance to the earlier work, There is no Night (1949, Dublin City Gallery) was noted by one writer. This iconic painting shows a male figure reclining in an open marshy landscape. He lifts himself up and gestures, in a similar fashion to the figure in this painting, to a distant white galloping horse. However in Glory to the Brave Singer the view into space is curtailed by the rich vegetation that encircles the woman. The title adds a sense of drama and intrigue with its connotations of subterfuge and danger. This is a highly romantic work, part of a series of Yeats’s later paintings that portray the enduring beauty of nature and its power over humanity. The painting was shown in Munster Fine Art Club Exhibition in Cork in 1956 and several times at the Victor Waddington Gallery in London in the late 1950s and 1960s but it has rarely been exhibited in public since becoming part of a private collection in 1971. It belongs firmly with the other great epic paintings of Yeats’s late works. Dr Róisín Kennedy Hilary Pyle comments on page 967 of her Catalogue Raisonné: ‘A figure lying in a forest glade raises himself on his elbow and flourishes his arm up to the dawn sky, singing the while. Every colour has been employed in the impasto drawing, which is done on a lightly stained ground. The composition resembles that of a A Homage to Bret Harte, (Pyle No. 579); while the visionary mood accords with the larger canvases such as 1067 (Shouting, sold at Whyte’s, 29 November 2021, lot 37, €1.7 million) From the catalogue for Christie’s sale on 12 May, 2005: The present work was painted in 1950, a year after Yeats had painted the smaller Singing ‘My Dark Rosaleen’ (sold in Christie’s, 20 May 1999, lot 129, for €400,000). Ireland had by this time become a Republic and Yeats was an established figure of the art world. He had been a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland for over ten years and had major exhibitions in both Dublin (1945) and at the Tate Gallery in London (1948). In these paintings Yeats was using the act of singing as a symbol of unrestrained passion, specifically relating it to an expression of nationalistic feeling. My Dark Rosaleen, which the 1949 painting refers to in the title is a traditional nationalistic song, addressing Ireland in the guise of a lover, under the psuedonym of ‘the little black rose’.