WHYTE'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART Monday 11 March 2024 at 6pm

24 12 Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) WAVES AT BOWMORE, ROSSES POINT, SLIGO, 1936 oil on board signed upper right; titled on reverse 9 by 14in. (22.9 by 35.6cm) Frame Size: 18 by 22in. (45.7 by 55.9cm) Provenance: Sold to Dermod O’Brien PRHA, 1936; Dr. Brendan O’Brien, Dublin; Private collection Exhibited: ‘Recent Paintings’, Dunthorne, London, 19 March to 15 April 1936, catalogue no. 31; ’National Loan Exhibition’, National College of Art, June to July 1945 Literature: Pyle, Hilary, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné Of The Oil Paintings, André Deutsch, London, 1992, Vol. I, No. 472, p.429 Waves at Bowmore depicts the dunes and sea at Rosses Point, Co Sligo where the Garavogue River flows into the Atlantic Ocean. Bowmore is a headland north of the town where horse racing was held during Yeats’s youth and which he referred to in a number of paintings, especially Looking Down on the Old Racecourse of Bowmore (1944, Private Collection). The area, which was very evocative of his childhood and his lifelong interest in maritime themes, was very familiar to Jack Yeats. It was where his uncle Henry Middleton lived and where his favourite uncle George Pollexfen was a frequent racecourse visitor. This lively painting in which the turbulent waves of the sea interact with the sand and grasses of the land, is a subject, the boundary of land and water, that Yeats used in several pure landscapes such as Early Morning, Cliffoney, (1941), False Morning Promise (1945) and most notably, Fresh and Salt, (1944). In the distance to the left of the composition is the Black Rock lighthouse which was constructed to protect shipping in Sligo bay in the 1830s. The black band visible on its surface was only added to the colour scheme in the 1930s at around the time that Yeats painted the work, a remarkably contemporary reference. The whole surface of the painting evokes movement, with small strokes of pure colour depicting the sky, sea and land. The artist has used the handle of a brush or a similar implement to scrape back into the paint in the lower left foreground. This allows light into the dark green and further suggests the energy and dynamism of nature and the exuberant feeling of being present in such a bracing environment. The painting belonged to the artist Dermod O’Brien PRHA and was lent by him to the Jack B. Yeats National Loan Exhibition in 1945, just a few months before O’Brien’s death. Dr Róisín Kennedy, February 2024 €35,000-€45,000 (£29,910-£38,460 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot12