A grand painter who loved horses and hats

Patrick Skene Catling

JACK YEATS by Bruce Arnold Yale, £29.95, pp. 418 The Irish genius traditionally has been expressed best in words. In Jack Yeats's time (1871-1957), as Bruce Arnold points out in this admirable biography of 'Ire- land's leading painter':

There was a comfortable, if deluded, idea in Ireland that visual art was largely the prerogative of a middle- and upper-class culture, with its leadership in the hands of Protestant and Ascendancy people . . . Catholic Ireland, at least, had risen up to express itself through verbal and not plastic achievement.

Perhaps; though Arnold does not, nor needs to, discuss the possible economic causes of this dichotomy, it is certainly true that words have always been free, while paints have cost money.

Yeats's good friend Samuel Beckett accounted for any national lack of interest in painting with a comprehensive indict- ment of his compatriots. He wrote that he was unable to imagine that 'the Irish peo- ple' (a concept he said he found difficult to grasp)

gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever, whether before the Union or after . . . or that it will ever care or know, any more than the Bog of Allen will ever care or know, that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler Yeats.

However, Arnold demonstrates at great length and in convincing detail that the Irish people, even before most of them changed into urban attire, recognised Yeats as 'an isolated, giant figure in Irish 20th-century art'.

His pre-eminent status was widely cele- brated, and diminished only a little by the fact that there was a contemporary short- age of giants. He was prolific, but his rewards, though sufficient for him to make a not uncomfortable living, were far from gigantic. Only a few years before his death it was possible to buy for £30 one of the canvases whose prices are now in the hun- dreds of thousands. In the current Jack Yeats boom, the 1998 record was £881,500.

This handsomely designed volume, pro- fusely illustrated in black and white and colour, is all that the biography of an artist should be, a clear definition of his place in his country's cultural history, a sympathetic yet unsentimentally balanced critical analy- sis of his works, warts-and-all portraits of him, his family, friends and colleagues, and an objective acknowledgment of his taste in hats (romantic-bohemian).

Formally named John Butler Yeats after his father, a talented painter of realistic portraits who was domestically ineffectual, Jack was born in London. He 'coped well with his dysfunctional family, being more detached,' Arnold writes, 'particularly so at crucial periods in his young life'. Rather than argue with his father, he ignored him. While members of the family always declared mutual affection, they soon con- trived to do so at a distance.

Jack left his parents, his brother Willie and their two sisters in London as soon as possible and spent much of his childhood Jack Yeats in his twenties with his prosperous bourgeois Pollexfen grandparents by the sea in Sligo, in the west of Ireland. Willie — William Butler Yeats — was seven years older than Jack. The poet, actively campaigning with Lady Gregory and others for a mythical Celtic renaissance with political implications, was the first to achieve international celebrity. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Arnold aptly sums up the difference between them: 'Willie became a patrician in the newly formed Irish Free State. Jack became a radical.' Willie regarded himself as some sort of nationalistic crusader and assumed a grand, condescendingly didactic manner in relations with his brother. Jack, though ardently patriotic, was not dogmat- ic. Though he and his wife enjoyed social access to titled remnants of the Ascendan- cy aristocracy, his sense of Irishness was enhanced close to ordinary people and some extraordinary ones: he was par- ticularly attracted, at least imaginatively, to outlaws, gypsies, peasants, clowns and jockeys.

His academic preparation for an artistic career was nugatory. Arnold writes: Jack never tackled the serious side of his studies as an art student. He did not grapple with painting in oil, or with work on canvas; he engaged briefly in the rigour of life draw- ing, though without leaving any evidence.

He did not allow technical training to impinge upon his originality. This resis- tance to orthodoxy partly explains the indi- vidual strength and eloquence of his later oil paintings and the clumsiness of his tech- nique, which admirers praise as if it must have been deliberate.

Jack's idiosyncratic competence as a draughtsman enabled him to earn enough as an illustrator and cartoonist to get married. While living in a small house called Snail's Castle, in Devon, he devel- oped a delightfully boyish friendship with John Masefield. They built model ships, sailed them in a river and bombarded them. The poet wrote commemorative verses.

Every year of the Devon period, Jack regularly spent summers in the west of Ire- land, becoming more deeply committed to his country and people. There was a close, affectionate collaboration with John Millington Synge, contributing articles on Connemara to the Manchester Guardian.

In middle age, Yeats moved to Dublin and spent the rest of his life there. He was a gregarious, clubbable man, a popular member of the United Arts Club. He dras- tically changed his style of painting, shift- ing, as Arnold records, from 'smooth brushstrokes in the oils of the 1920s to vio- lent, stirred impasto and vivid splashes of colour in later works', to produce the pas- sionate daubs for which he is best known and most loved.

After a brief hiatus, when he wrote some enigmatic novels, there was a final frenzy of creativity. Between the ages of 70 and 85, he painted 500 oils, half his entire out- put. The National Gallery of Ireland owns 23 of his oil paintings. Several years ago, when I first saw some of them, I wondered why they were there. Such is the skill with which Bruce Arnold has conveyed an appreciation of Jack Yeats's humanity and warmth that I am now able to understand his art's appeal. It epitomises the freedom of wild horses.

`Cezanne,' Jack once said, dismissing a foreign rival reputation, `C6zanne. Sez who?' In Irish art, the magical name is Yeats.