Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 21st October 2019

48 37 Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) Early Morning signed lower left and titled verso oil on panel 24 x 36cm (9.25 x 14.25in) Provenance: Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin 1943; Collection of Leo Smith, late 1950’s; Private Collection, Ireland; Private Collection, UK; Private Collection, Northern Ireland Literature: Hilary Pyle, Jack B Yeats - A Catalogue Raisonee of the Oil Paintings, Andre Deutsch Ltd., London, 1992. Volume 1, Catalogue No.523 on page 482 (illustrated). €60,000-80,000 (£53,097-70,796) As Hilary Pyle notes in her catalogue raisonné, in the early 1940’s Jack Yeats painted two small landscapes in the early 1940’s, both entitled Early Morning. This panel, which is signed on the lower left, is probably Early Morning, Tipperary. Framed by a tree on the right, a sun-dappled laneway in the foreground and a luminous early morning sky above, this joyous painting celebrates the beauty of an ordinary everyday ditch and hedgerow in the West of Ireland. The hedgerow is a symphony of colour, with russets, greens, yellows and brown combining to recreate the feeling experienced by the artist as he walked along this country road. This is Yeats painting the memory of a lived experience, rendering sky and vegetation with expressive and intuitive flashes of colour, applied with a palette knife to the canvas. The tree on the right is sinuous and almost fragmentary, captured as it were with the leaves being rustled by the wind. The laneway is lost to sight as it disappears around a corner, suggesting the promise of a future glimpse the sea and a coastal panorama, the sort of Sligo landscape that Yeats loved to paint. But this is a more intimate scene, where the artist captures the atmosphere of an early morning ramble, and where the viewer can join in appreciating the essence of the Irish countryside. In later paintings of early morning, such as his 1951 The Violence of the Dawn, Yeats is more expressionist, and plays on the visual drama of clouds, stormy seas and radiant sunlight. But in this canvas from 1942, the mood is quieter and more elegiac. In his ‘Homage to Jack B. Yeats’, published in Les Lettres Nouvelles, 1954, the artist’s friend Samuel Beckett wrote “What is incomparable in this great solitary oeuvre is its insistence upon sending us back to the darkest part of the spirit that created it and upon permitting illuminations only through that darkness.” Beckett described Yeats’ images as ‘desperately immediate’, asking rhetorically if it was possible to embellish “On this great internal reality which incorporates into a single witness dead and living spirits, nature and void, everything that will not cease and everything that will never be.” Peter Murray, September 2019