Jack Butler Yeats, R.H.A. (1871-1957)

A Memory

Details

Jack Butler Yeats, R.H.A. (1871-1957)
A Memory
signed 'JACK B YEATS' (lower right), inscribed 'A MEMORY' (on the reverse and on the inside of the stretcher)
oil on canvas
14 x 21 in. (35.6 x 53.4 cm.)
Painted in 1930

Provenance

The Artist's Estate.
Waddington Galleries, Montreal, where purchased by the present owner's family.

Literature

H. Pyle, Jack B. Yeats A Catalogue Raisonn of the Oil Paintings I, London, 1992, no.428, p.387 (illustrated).
Idem III, p.181 (illustrated).

Exhibited

London, Alpine Club Gallery, Jack B. Yeats Paintings, June-July 1930, no.2.
Dublin, Engineers' Hall, Jack B. Yeats Paintings, April-May 1931, no.26.
Dublin, Victor Waddington Galleries, Jack B. Yeats Paintings, March 1945, no.7.
Los Angeles, Felix Landau Gallery, Jack B. Yeats Paintings, April-May 1962, no.5.
Montreal, Waddington Galleries, Jack B. Yeats Paintings, May-June 1975.

Lot Essay

Hilary Pyle (loc. cit.) comments on the present work: 'A dining hall, with a night landscape visible through the arched windows to the right. A uniformed man decorated with medals joins in a duet with the woman standing beside him, while the figures scattered about the long table listen. Rich colours, enhanced with chrome and vermilion impasto, describe the scene, drawing on a lightly stained canvas.

The 'memory' of a Joycean occasion derives from a dream as well as from actual memory, a dream which Yeats had been exploring in his drawings from 1916 and which was one of the origins of the rich fantasy that invades his painting and writing from this period on'.

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