Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) He Reads a Book (1952) O...

Estimate

€500,000 - €700,000

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) He Reads a Book (1952) Oil on canvas, 46 x 61cm (18 x 24'') Signed Provenance: Sold by the artist to Victor Waddington Galleries, December 1956; Collection Vincent and Jacqueline O’Brien, Ireland 1971, thence by descent. Exhibited: London, Wildenstein, Recent Paintings, 4 – 28 March 1953, cat.no.15; Dublin, Victor Waddington Galleries, Oil Paintings, October 1953, cat.no.4; Dublin, Municipal Gallery, An Tóstal: Irish Painting 1903 – 1953, April – July, 1953, cat.no.3; Belfast, Museum and Art Gallery, Paintings, (organised by CEMA, the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts), February – March, 1956, cat.no.38; Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, on loan up to summer 2024. Literature: Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Andre Deutsch, London, 1992, cat.no. 1111, p.1013 (illustrated) The extraordinary subject of this painting is a man reading a book while on horseback. Hilary Pyle suggests that it may have been based on something that the artist had seen.¹ The prancing form of the horse with its forelegs raised and its hindlegs firmly on the ground is highly unusual and suggests that the animal is performing a specific pose rather than galloping over the terrain. The theme may have originated in the context of a circus or stage performance seen by Yeats such as the circus in the West of Ireland that he illustrated for J M Synge’s In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara, published in 1911 or the double balancing act depicted in The Circus, (1921, Private Collection). In the former, a man stands on the back of a horse, balancing himself with a baton. Yeats revisited many such encounters in his later works. Most notably in the context of this work is the Cavalier’s Farewell to its Steed (1948, NGI) in which a swaggering figure of a man bids adieu to a merry go round horse. The subject may also have been inspired by Yeats’s love of American cowboy literature such as the bizarre frontier tales of Bret Harte. The rider seems oblivious to his surroundings or perhaps he is imagining his adventures on horseback inspired by his reading material. In Tir na nÓg (1936, Private Collection) Yeats depicts a young boy engrossed in a book while surrounded by the tiny figures of the land of youth which he has been reading about. In several other late works Yeats concentrates on figures reading, unaware of the world around them. These include A Giant Reading, (1942, Private Collection), Man Reading (1945, Private Collection) and The City (1944, Private Collection) where a man stands engrossed in his newspaper. Yeats sets the rider and horse in a vast open landscape. A strong opaque palette is applied in a manner that conveys the energy and vitality of nature with swirling clouds and the brisk movement of the horse in the empty terrain. Behind the horse and rider is a huge outcrop of rock which casts a deep blue shadow below them. To the right an expanse of pale mauve and purple mountains closes off the horizon creating a tremendous sense of vast, uninhabited space. In contrast to the delicate hues of the peaks, the bright orange and yellow of the horse with its noble head and flying mane and tail create a dramatic contrast. These powerful colours are augmented by the intense blue of the horse’s hooves and the surrounding landscape. The eyes of the animal are carved out of two strokes of thick impasto paint which along with the blue tip of its nose suggests the sensuous awareness of the beast to nature and the world around it. By contrast, the white form of the rider, his face masked by his book, seems an incongruous element in this scenario. The work could be seen as a riposte to Yeats’s Singing Horseman (1949, National Gallery of Ireland) where the crooning rider opens himself to the wild landscape. In He Reads a Book, the glorious figure of the horse dominates the composition, becoming a symbol of freedom and the intuitive intelligence of the animal kingdom. Dr. Róisín Kennedy, October 2024 [1] Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, André Deutsch, London, 1992, II, p.1013.