The Clown of Ocean

The Clown of Ocean is a flamboyant image in which Yeats fuses his love of the circus and the sea in the spirit of his fantasy paintings. An elaborately dressed clown, in white sailor trousers, a stylised red and yellow jacket (to emphasise the theatrical element of his nature) and a trailing scarf tied around his head, stands bare foot astride a raft, steering away from the coastline into the ocean. The clown, heroically aloft this rather precarious vessel and commanding the whole picture plane, faces out boldly into the wider ocean, the giant oar in his hands foretelling the difficulty of this undertaking. Gentle waves lap around the coastline and the brilliance of the blue sky, streaked with yellow and filled with white clouds, gives a sense of hope to this adventure, but the choppier waves in the near distance speak of a journey that will not be devoid of some jeopardy. The edge of the ocean meets the horizon and there is no indication of where he intends to travel or how long the journey will take.

Hilary Pyle (loc. cit.) has commented that Yeats’ only reference to the subject of the painting in his writings is in The Careless Flower, 1933: ‘‘… the second steward would put on a clown’s costume and give a one-man show with various home-made instruments, an imitation of an old gaffer with a red-spotted handkerchief and a clay pipe … an old world touch of old-world clown of ocean’. In the painting, of course, the clown – outside the circus ring – is seen in the image of the height and depth in all mankind, translated in a crazy fantasy of freedom as he punts elatedly into the distance, and the ocean is a parable of the glorious and unpredictable world’.

In his fantasy paintings, Yeats seeks to invite the viewer to consider the joy of adventure in new lands, and in travelling by sea the artist imbues these images with the intoxicating possibilities of self-discovery and fulfilment. In this painting, Yeats presents us with the clown, as Everyman, and gives him an opportunity to leave his past behind and to seek acceptance in new vistas.