Φ Jack Butler Yeats (Irish 1871-1957)

Jack Butler Yeats (Irish 1871-1957)
The Plains of Mayo
Signed JACK B/YEATS (lower left), and inscribed THE PLAINS/OF MAYO (to verso)
Oil on board, 1949
24.8 x 37.4cm

Provenance:
The Artist;
Collection of Raymond Bantock;
The Waddington Galleries, London;
Purchased from the above by the father of the present owner;
And by family descent

Literature:
Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, p.876, no.967

Painted in 1949, The Plains of Mayo, exemplifies Jack Butler Yeats mature expressionistic style, when he created some of his most sought after paintings. Painted at the apex of his career, it demonstrates how he broke away from the confines of line, to create a dynamic scene full of swirling movement and thick impasto, with figure and landscape merging into one another. Typically the fluid, instinctive brushwork is enhanced by a rich variety of colour, and the work embodies Thomas Rosenthal's view that "the 1940s gave us a series of paintings in which the artist's vigour in terms of colour and composition seemed to grow ever more powerful".

The title of the present work may be a reference to the famed Irish poet and fiddler, Antoine Ó Raifteirí (1784-1835), sometimes known as Anthony Raftery. Blind since childhood, Ó Raifteirí was an itinerant performer in an ancient tradition. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries people started to publish and translate his poems. Indeed Yeats illustrated a translation of Ó Raifteirí's County Mayo by Padraic Colum (1881-1972) for his poetry pamphlet A Broadside in May 1912, which contains the lines "I solemnly swear that the heart in me rises/As the wind rises up and the mist breaks below;/When I think upon Carra and Gallen down from it/The Bush of the Mile and the Plains of Mayo".