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

64 The painting depicts a boy stepping onto a derelict ship tied up to a quay, overlooked by a three-storey building with porticoed doorway. Barefoot, dressed in a blue pullover and green trousers, the legs of which have been rolled up, the boy advances cautiously along the gangplank. Over his left shoulder he carries what appears to be a sack, or a jacket. In his right hand, held high to help maintain his balance, is a newspaper or white packet. The risk of falling, as the boy advances along the slippery gangway, adds drama to the scene. Yeats often depicted people whose lives entailed a degree of risk, or drama, such as circus performers, actors, ragamuffins, jockeys and sailors. He imbued his paintings with a sense of private and personal memory, and a desire to place the viewer almost within the event being depicted. His art provides glimpses into an everyday life, mainly of Sligo, and also into his own imaginative world. His feeling of empathy for the excluded and marginalised can be traced back to Yeats’s early life, when he lived in London. Economic deprivation, and people living on the fringes of society, are constant themes in his work. He was drawn to quays, as he described in his novel The Charmed Life, published in 1938: ‘We took no chances. Down by the quayside we felt able to look about us without fear, for there we were among men of the wide world, travellers, men of the hilly seas, like ourselves, distrustful of these townsmen with their yellow-lighted shops’ While Yeats has used his characteristic impasto and palette-knife technique in depicting quayside, ship and boy, the handling of the facade of the building is more sparing, with the gesso surface of the canvas left exposed at several points. Enhanced by flecks of pale lemon yellow, this light umber tone predominates throughout the painting. The red cabin and bridge of the ship, probably a trawler or small coastal trading vessel, frames the right hand side of the painting. Immediately below the cabin, a rope is knotted around a bollard. The tall windows on the facade of the Georgian building are rendered as vertical dark streaks above the ship, while laneways on either side of the building are also vertical bands of dark shadow, rendered in ultramarine and cobalt blue, and contrasting with the horizontal lines of quayside and ship’s deck. The location of the quay has not been identified, although it is likely to be Sligo. Four years before this painting was completed, Yeats had being invited, by Kenneth Clark, to exhibit at the National Gallery in London. His reputation as one of the leading artists of his time was confirmed by the publication, in 1945, of Thomas McGreevy’s Jack B. Yeats: an appreciation and an interpretation. McGreevy regarded Yeats’s art as quintessentially Irish but also of international importance. Peter Murray, September 2019