Art
MR. JACK B. YEATS AT THE ENGINEERS' HALL, DUBLIN.
WILLIAM MORRIS thanked God for creating anything so pungent as an onion. Poets of the Celtic school seem to share Morris's mind ; and so we have F. R. Higgins bringing the smells of the cattle fair into airy lyrics, and Hamish MaeLaren sending his dreamland sailors forth with banjos. The arts of eye and tongue would be matched exquisitely if Mr. Higgins would write poems for Mr. Jack Yeats's pictures, or if Mr. Yeats would illustrate the book that opens :-- " There were three mariners did to a tavern come
For singing, and dancing, and the best Jamaica rum."
The glamour of the wild skies. and the tang of homely reality mix in all Mr. Yeats's paintings ; but, in this year's exhibition, which he is giving at the Engineers' Hall in Dublin, he handles his materials in a new fashion. Only one of the thirty pictures shown has his olden clarity. This is Man versus Horse ; it depicts a race under green heavens, as seen from a dusky grand-stand. Here is the flavour of those pic- tures of life in the West of Ireland that made the artist's fame. The rest of his new pictures all have the vagueness of line which began to appear in his work a few years ago. They are masses of colour which seems to have been struck upon the canvas in an instant as brief as the glimpses that they depict ; and so, out of a whirl of vivid oils, we share the artist's momen- tary vision of lads and lasses flying through the sky on Chair- o-planes," or the flashing of colours in a wild activity as he sees " Contortionists " at a circus with the tail of his eye.
Most of these new pictures are noted for darkness. They show us scenes of twilight, or, rather, to use the appropriate Irish epithet, scenes of dayli' gone." Through a glimmering room figures vaguely are discerned, or from a sombre window the violent purple of a winter sunset glows. Such pictures are A Room in Ballyshannon and Going to Wolfe Tone's Grave. The beauty of these dusky views reveals itself only after patient contemplation ; but then how one marvels at the painter's art of omission He has left only what darkness leaves, as if he had painted a daylight scene and then repainted it when the light had faded. A Coal Boat lies beside a darkling quay. and Old Timers from 'Frisco pass in almost shapeless profile. We begin to grow hungry for light.
Happily we receive it. A Farewell to Mayo gives us. as in the artist's earlier work, all the brilliant exhilaration of the Atlantic skies, and the almost throbbing colour of the heaven- reflecting wet land. Riding towards us are two figures, back to back on a side-car ; the coat of one sharp against the light, the other frayed by the oblique striking of the luminance. We do not need the title to convey the overwhelming nostaglia that is rising in the rugged figure for whom the skies have spread their ineffable brilliance. Here is all the poetry of that world out of which the singers are sending us their salted words.
The exhibition is one of a perfected art ; we only dare to wish that the painter would avoid an excessive obscurity, as when, in a passionate excitement of colour, he depicts a Woman Crossing a Bridge, but has to tell us what be has painted. A. DE B.
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