WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART MONDAY 2 DECEMBER 2024 FROM 6PM

58 Jack Yeats is recorded as having painted 672 oil paintings in the 14 year period from 1941 to 1955; the most prolific years of his career. In 1945, when The Dust on Thy Chariot Wheel was painted, Yeats was in his prime as an artist at the age of 74 with a major exhibition held in Dublin - The Jack B. Yeats National Loan Exhibition - and the publication of Jack B. Yeats. An Appreciation and an Interpretation by Thomas MacGreevy1 all taking place that year. The Dust on Thy Chariot Wheel was exhibited twice three years later in 1948 in Leeds and London and it was that same year a major retrospective of his work took place at the Tate Gallery, London. Hilary Pyle in her catalogue raisonné of his oil paintings writes: ”The scene is the procession which announces the arrival of the circus in a country town, a supremely important cultural event for the locality. The artist recalls the procession which was the excitement of his youth with the ironic twist of humour of the title, and the image of a charioteer and his pair of horses. ‘Dust on thy chariot wheel’ was, it seems, a symbol of the hurly-burly of life for Yeats.” Yeats drew regularly upon his early works and sketchbooks for the inspiration and composition of his more formal oil paintings and Pyle lists three early examples which explored the subject of the circus procession including the wagon or chariot. Of those listed, The Circus Chariot, 1910 (crayon and watercolour; 25.4 by 35.5cm, Collection of the National Gallery of Ireland, NGI.6316) is perhaps the most interesting example to compare with the present work. A dark work on paper, it depicts a chariot drawn by three horses; driven wildly in perilous conditions by a man in ancient British dress,2 a circus tent within a barren landscape in the background. There is ferocious energy and freedom to this scene which tallies with the artist’s early excitement of the circus experienced in his youth. The strength and skill of the driver is highlighted and shows the full figure of the man and his horses as they battle the elements. The Dust on Thy Chariot Wheel by contrast is a more meditative painting but it is equally epic. Neither weather nor landscape distracts the viewer here. The composition is condensed and the space the figures inhabit is unfamiliar but for the silhouette of a big-top to the right of the composition. Here the ethereal rider is composed and in full control of his obedient, Cerulean steeds; symbols of the freedom of Yeats’ youth. The drama of the scene is felt through the physical act of painting. The panel is generously and exuberantly impastoed with an unbridled use of blues, reds and yellows reinforcing a sense of pageantry and occasion. In his essay, An Artist of Gaelic Ireland c.1902, George Russell described Yeats’ use of colour - in words that read as almost prophetic in the context of his later oils 3 - “The colouring grows better every year; it is more varied and purer... always charged with sentiment, and there is a curious fitness in it even when it is evidently unreal... and yet we accept it as natural... it enters into the soul... it becomes part of the atmosphere of the mind”. It is indeed “the atmosphere of the mind”where Yeats’ later paintings dwell. They are a fusion of memory and myth, a blend of his lived experiences during his youth coupled with the reality of his present. The charioteer gazes upwards in expectation and at this juncture in the artist’s life the passage of time and an acceptance of his own mortality must have been playing on his mind. But although he may have been contemplating the end, with his most productive years before him he wasn’t about to let the dust settle. Adelle Hughes November 2024 1 Hilary Pyle in her catalogue entry for the present work notes: “Writing to Thomas MacGreevy in June 1932 about Mrs Duncan, who ran the Dublin Arts Club, and her recent illness, he commented, ‘The Club indeed, she may hope, may once again become the “dust on her chariot wheels”. 2 Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: His watercolours Drawings and Pastels, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1993, no. 706, p.166 (illustrated) 3 George Russell died 10 years before The Dust on Thy Chariot Wheel was painted.