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

26 13 Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) TIDE COMING IN, BALLYCASTLE, COUNTY MAYO, 1909 oil on board signed lower right; titled on reverse 9.50 by 14in. (24.1 by 35.6cm) Frame Size: 16.5 by 20.5in. (41.9 by 52.1cm) Provenance: Sold by the artist to Leo Smith, 1946; Adam’s, 5 July 1979, lot 69; Private collection Exhibited: ‘Pictures of Life in the West of Ireland’, Leinster Hall, Dublin, 8-21 December 1910, catalogue no. 27; ’Pictures of Life in the West of Ireland’, Walker Art Gallery, London, 1-13 July 1912, catalogue no. 20; ’Drawings and Pictures of Life in the West of Ireland’, Mills Hall, Dublin, 23 March to 6 April 1918, catalogue no. 6 Literature: Pyle, Hilary, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné Of The Oil Paintings, André Deutsch, London, 1992, Vol. I, No. 8, p.9 This early oil painting by Jack B. Yeats was painted after a visit to the north Mayo town of Ballycastle in 1909. Yeats had visited and sketched the area several times before, including on his travels with John Millington Synge in 1905 when the two men collaborated on a series of articles on the region for the Manchester Guardian. Yeats recorded scenes of the district in a sketchbook in 1909 (151) now in the National Gallery of Ireland. His archive in the museum also has a number of photographs of the town, taken on this visit. The artist painted several paintings of the scenery and the characters of the area, including two paintings of nearby dramatic Downpatrick Head and a depiction of two card players entitled A Night in Ballycastle which was reproduced in the Irish Review in 1911. 1 Tide Coming In, Ballycastle is a serene view of the rocky coastline with a headland dominating the horizon line. The restrained blue and pink, brown tones are applied in thick, opaque brushstrokes, producing a calm, flat surface in which the movement of the sea water is subtly conveyed. Yeats was accompanied on this visit to Mayo by his wife, Cottie and they seemed to have had a relaxing time. Yeats wrote to John Quinn, the New York collector from the May Hotel in Ballycastle in June 1909, telling him that when Quinn visited Ireland, ‘perhaps you could come away to some quiet place like this for a couple of days. Where … you could lie on your back in the heather or on the rocks by the sea or tramp along the coast’. 2 Dr Róisín Kennedy, February 2024 Footnotes: 1 . The Irish Review, 1, No. 2 (April 1911) 2 . Quoted in Homan Potterton, ‘Jack B. Yeats and John Quinn’, Irish Arts Review, 9, 1993, p. 109. €25,000-€35,000 (£21,370-£29,910 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot13