IMPORTANT IRISH ART Monday 23 November 2026 from 6PM

40 Jack B. Yeats, like the rest of his family, had a gift for using words as well as pencil or paint; and even though he claimed to have not even a note of music, the number of ballad singers in his drawings and paintings, and the regularity with which he refers to ballads or melodies in his work indicates that he listened and relished what he heard. The Plains of Mayo was a folksong originally found by George Petrie (1790-1866), a Dublin scholar, antiquarian and artist, who noted down the traditional ballads and airs he heard as he was travelling through the countryside painting landscapes, in the early 19th century. These were published in 1855 as The Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland, and Yeats would have known about Petrie’s collection, perhaps it even stimulated his own particular interest in ballad singers. The name of the county itself comes from Old Irish, meaning ‘the plain of yew trees’. Titles were an integral part of Yeats’s paintings, particularly in his late work as it became more abstract. Perhaps this painting has a note of nostalgia in it, remembering one of his visits to Mayo as a young man. Or he may have heard some one singing, or whistling the song, arousing his own memories. Jack Yeats creates an imaginary scene, where a youth has thrown himself down on a hillock, to gaze at the undulating landscape before him, crowned by the familiar shape of Croagh Patrick on the horizon, a traditional place of pilgrimage in Mayo. The colours and tone of the painting are similar to those in The Singing Horseman, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, and also of 1949. His picture, Man Hearing an Old Song dates from the same year. Hilary Pyle, October 2026