拍品专文
Hilary Pyle writes of this work 'Painted in 1947, the picture has a type of colouring adopted regularly by the artist about this time. Indigo, deep and meditative, is matched with a vibrant golden gorse yellow, relieved here and there with a dash of blood-like carmine. Yeats's realities had become metaphysical and dual-edged, sinking through experience into the universal. The character here reading a book may be indentified with himself, and his personal memories, but is as readily interpretable as anyone's encounter with him or herself.
An elderly man sitting at a window has opened a large book to be confronted by an illustration which causes him to gaze out of the window in inner reflection. The window, and his ghastly expression, indicate a moment of revelation not altogether pleasing; and yet there is a child-like innocence in the man's eyes which suggests that the experience has been rewarding.
The man has seen a portrait, perhaps even of himself. The size of the book suggests that the 'frontispiece' introduces an article or story within a collection, in a volume of the kind to which Yeats and his father contributed illustrations during the 1890s. The man in the coat of a spiritualising blue identifies in some poignant way with the printed portrait and finds an emotional release in the natural landscape beyong the window, whose light shed all over his face'.
(private correspondence, March 1996).
An elderly man sitting at a window has opened a large book to be confronted by an illustration which causes him to gaze out of the window in inner reflection. The window, and his ghastly expression, indicate a moment of revelation not altogether pleasing; and yet there is a child-like innocence in the man's eyes which suggests that the experience has been rewarding.
The man has seen a portrait, perhaps even of himself. The size of the book suggests that the 'frontispiece' introduces an article or story within a collection, in a volume of the kind to which Yeats and his father contributed illustrations during the 1890s. The man in the coat of a spiritualising blue identifies in some poignant way with the printed portrait and finds an emotional release in the natural landscape beyong the window, whose light shed all over his face'.
(private correspondence, March 1996).