Lot Essay
Hilary Pyle writes of this work 'In 1924, Yeats painted several pictures with Sligo themes. He was living in Dublin and painting the capital city, but, as at all times, regarded Sligo as his inspiration. He painted both Lough Gill and Glencar Waterfall this year.
Tides had always fascinated him. A newspaper cutting preserved in a sketchbook of 1915 lists high tides, and by 1924 the notion of the spring tide, described by Walter Scott as the 'spring tide of ecstacy', was already assuming esoteric undercurrents, related by Yeats to youth at its supreme moment, which would culminate in his instensely poetic High Water, Spring Tide of 1938.
Yeats's paintings of this mid-twenties period, when his style was undergoing a radical change, and he suddenly found himself released from the confines of line, are spontaneously romantic and original, prior to moving into the complexity of subsequent paintings. Rosses Point, where he spent the summers as a boy with ins cousins, was a source of some of his most imaginative works'.
(private correspondence, March 1996).
Tides had always fascinated him. A newspaper cutting preserved in a sketchbook of 1915 lists high tides, and by 1924 the notion of the spring tide, described by Walter Scott as the 'spring tide of ecstacy', was already assuming esoteric undercurrents, related by Yeats to youth at its supreme moment, which would culminate in his instensely poetic High Water, Spring Tide of 1938.
Yeats's paintings of this mid-twenties period, when his style was undergoing a radical change, and he suddenly found himself released from the confines of line, are spontaneously romantic and original, prior to moving into the complexity of subsequent paintings. Rosses Point, where he spent the summers as a boy with ins cousins, was a source of some of his most imaginative works'.
(private correspondence, March 1996).