Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) The Window with a View of...

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€300,000 - €500,000

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) The Window with a View of the Town (1951) Oil on canvas, 51 x 68.5cm (20 x 27'') Signed Provenance: Sold to Mrs Mabel Spiro at the exhibition in 1951; Collection Vincent and Jacqueline O’Brien, Ireland 1971, thence by descent. Exhibited: Dublin, Victor Waddington Galleries, Paintings, October 1951 cat.no.4; Belfast, Museum and Art Gallery, Paintings, (organised by CEMA, the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts), February – March, 1956, cat.no.15; Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, on loan from 2017 to 2024. Literature: Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Andre Deutsch, London, 1992, cat.no. 1080, p.984 (illustrated) An old man and a young boy stand together looking out through a window. Below them a town with a tall spire can be seen. The boy leans his head on his arm and gazes wistfully into the distance. His companion has a benevolent expression on his angular face which is skillfully sculpted out of white and blue paint. To the couple’s left the room opens onto a loggia with grass and trees in the garden beyond. A white hat on a table indicates that this is a summer day and that the two figures may have come in from outside to look out the window. An oval mirror on the wall behind them and the heavy drapes are indicative of the elaborate décor of the house. The subject may relate to Sligo which was the location for several paintings by Yeats which use interiors and windows as their core device. These include A Room in Sligo (1935, Private Collection) which shows a view of the mall through a large window. Evening Light (1943, Private Collection) also uses a large window on the right with figures in an old fashioned interior. Evening in Sligo (1937, Private Collection) recalls a formal dinner with an outstanding landscape visible through the window. The Window with a View of the Town may also be derived from a memory from Yeats’s childhood in that county where he spent a great deal of time with his grandfather. The use of doorways and openings off the main space is also a frequent ploy found in Yeats’s pictures of interiors. One of the earliest is A Dancer (Rosses Point Sligo) (1921, Private Collection) which while a more modest abode than the one in this painting, also shows a doorway opening onto a hallway on the left and extending into other spaces. This manner of framing the composition into a series of spatial elements derives partly from the work of such Post-Impressionist artists as Paul Cézanne. Yeats’s development of it in his work relates to his fascination with the creation of temporary performance spaces in theatre and the circus and from his desire to draw attention to the similar artificiality of space created within a painting. The agitated handling of paint that determines the fluctuating and dynamic surface of the painting is contrasted by the balanced geometrical division of the composition. The rectangular shape of the window opening is echoed by that of the open doorway leading into the loggia and the garden beyond. Strong vertical elements such as the door jambs and the beam of the loggia create a strong sense of structure and provide an almost theatrical setting for the poignant moment between the two figures in the foreground as they gaze out at another view. The dominant blue and white of the palette is indicative of shadow and is contrasted by patches of intense red and yellow and by the luscious green of the foliage outside. The modelling of the two figures in thick impasto is extremely sensitively handled and ably conveys the intimacy and tenderness of this memory of a shared moment between two different generations. Dr. Róisín Kennedy, October 2024