Beschreibung:

Artist: Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) Title: My River (1950) Signature: signed 'JACK B YEATS' lower left and titled verso Medium: oil on board Size: 35½ x 46cm (14 x 18.1in) Framed Size: 54 x 64.1cm (21.3 x 25.2in) Provenance: Collection of Mr. and Mrs. H. Merkin, New York; Adams, Dublin, Important Irish Art Sale, 26th September 2012 lot 62; Private Collection Exhibited: Jack B. Yeats Exhibition: The Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin 1951, Catalogue No. 1 Literature: Jack Butler Yeats A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings by Hilary Pyle, Volume II, London, 1992, no. 1017, p. 922 (illustrated). a#morebtn { color: #de1d01; } a#morebtn:hover { cursor: pointer;} My River has an epic quality, with swirling masses of oil colour, applied with a palette knife and mixed directly on the canvas, creating a vision of a sweeping panoramic landscape. In the background, beneath a luminous sky, is Ben Bulben, the famous mountain overlooking Sligo, where Yeats spent muc... Read more Jack Butler Yeats Lot 12 - 'My River (1950)' Estimate: €60,000 - €80,000 My River has an epic quality, with swirling masses of oil colour, applied with a palette knife and mixed directly on the canvas, creating a vision of a sweeping panoramic landscape. In the background, beneath a luminous sky, is Ben Bulben, the famous mountain overlooking Sligo, where Yeats spent much of his childhood. Beneath the slopes of King's Mountain and Ben Bulben is the Drumcliffe River, flowing through the Glencar Valley. Yeats depicts the river as it enters the sea, just north of Rosses Point. In capturing the majestic quality of this Sligo landscape, Yeats evokes Biblical visionary paintings of the nineteenth century, a quality that is not accidental-his grandfather served as rector of Drumcliff church for over four decades, until his death in 1846, and his brother William Butler is buried at Drumcliff cemetery. Yeats also reveals in this work an astonishing skill, built up over a lifetime, in conveying such a vivid impression of landscape, through seemingly inchoate areas of colour applied with palette knife and brush. But this is an imaginative landscape, as much in the artist's mind as in reality, and is inspired by memory and feelings, rather than precise details of topography. The Drumcliffe river also features another late painting by Yeats, Low Tide, painted in 1954. In May 1951, in The Irish Monthly, the art critic and artist Brian O'Doherty wrote about My River, which he had seen exhibited at Victor Waddington Galleries in Dublin: "To-day, in his late seventies, Yeats is an artistic phenomenon. Like good wine, the artist has grown better with the years, and has shown no sign of diminishing powers, each new exhibition maintaining, if not raising, his reputation. Of late, one becomes aware of a new quality in some of his smaller, less pretentious pictures, for instance, My River and Quiet Harbour, in his latest exhibition. In them the old man, on the edge of the immensities, looks back nostalgically upon the sunlight years of youth, and evokes, like a high violin note, an intense pleasure which is akin to pain." The artist was in fact over eighty when the painting was exhibited, and it serves as a high point in a lifetime devoted to art. Peter Murray, October 2022