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THE GOULDING COLLECTION OF WORKS BY JACK BUTLER YEATS, R.H.A. Sir Basil Goulding had hoped to practise as an architect but with the sudden death of his father in 1935, he took over at the helm at the family firm, Goulding Fertilisers, at the age of twenty-two. In 1939, he married the Hon. Valerie Monckton, the only daughter of the 1st Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, and solicitor of Sir Winston Churchill, in a simple ceremony in front of four witnesses in Co. Donegal. During the Second World War, the couple lived in Surrey and returned to Ireland in 1945 to take up residence in Dargle Lodge, by one of the main entrances to the Powerscourt Estate in Co. Wicklow. Sir Basil continued to run the family firm while Lady Goulding founded The Central Remedial Clinic to help sufferers of polio after release from hospital. The clinic started life in a flat, where with the help of her friend, Kathleen O'Rourke, she quickly expanded it to become internationally renowned organisation that attracted the help of celebrities such as Fred Astaire and Princess Grace of Monaco. Later on Sir Jimmy Saville came to Ireland to lead the charity walk and his Rolls Royce with buckets held from each window became a regular feature of this annual event. Sir Basil had a passion for contemporary art and his first purchase was The Heroes of the Flames from the Dublin dealer Victor Waddington in 1943. This was the artist's first show at the gallery and from that time his commercial affairs were in good hands. Yeats had struggled for some years and had stacks of works in his studio from the 1920s and 1930s, some of which had only been shown at one or two exhibitions. Now his pictures were selling so quickly that there was little choice except amongst the largest canvases. The year before, at the age of seventy one, the National Gallery in London had honoured Yeats by hosting a retrospective exhibition of his work alongside Sir William Nicholson. Heroes of the Flames had been painted in 1929 and depicts a fire engine passing along a Dublin street. Yeats was thrilled by the out of the ordinary experience and loved situations that interrupted the mundane, whether it was a passing fire engine or the arrival of the circus to town. Sir Basil's next purchase was The Dormer Window in 1944, a small panel of a figure sitting upright in bed, perhaps a portrait of Yeats's wife Cottie who was bedridden by many years. The colours used are vibrant and typical of Yeats's output during the 1940s and 1950s. Having returned to live in Ireland, the couple subsequently bought The Race in 1947, the year in which it was painted. Yeats's depiction of a man, horse and boy running through a landscape, is symbolic of his representation of the horse as a symbol of youth, who sympathetically turns his head towards the boy, while leaving the man in his wake. Yeats's wife Cottie had finally died in 1947 and the artist found it difficult to paint, but exorcised his feelings with a number of emotive pictures. The Public Letter Writer from 1953, the final work in the group, was painted when Yeats was eighty three years old. In it he reminisces about the character who he had seen in New York in 1904, wearing a Buffalo Bill hat and writing letters for the illerate people of the Western States. This character would produce business cards at ten cents for a dozen, and once again he represents a source of excitement in the lives of ordinary people, whether in the streets of Dublin or New York. Sir Basil and Lady Goulding collected the work of other artists, there were five works by Frank Auerbach, Oscar Kokoschka, Henry Moore and Louis le Brocquy in their collection at one time, but it is with the work of Yeats that they are best known. In 1955 they had bought My Beautiful My Beautiful, Yeats's 40 x 60 inch masterpiece of a man with a horse.

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

The Race

細節

Jack Butler Yeats, R.H.A. (1871-1957)
The Race
signed 'JACK B YEATS' (lower left) and inscribed 'THE RACE' (on the inside of the stretcher)
, signed and inscribed again 'The Race/by/Jack B Yeats' (on a label attached to the reverse)
oil on canvas
14 x 21 in. (35.6 x 53.3 cm.)
Painted in 1947

來源

with Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin, 1947, where purchased by the present owner.

出版

H. Pyle, Jack Butler Yeats A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings II, London, 1992, no. 831, p. 750 (illustrated).
ibid., III, p. 431 (illustrated).

展覽

Dublin, Municipal Gallery, One Man's Meat: The Basil Goulding Collection, November-December 1961, no. 35.

注意事項

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

拍品專文

The catalyst for this inspiring vision The Race was undoubtedly the tumultuous landscape of the west of Ireland. Here Yeats has distilled the most distinctive and inspiring elements of this wind-battered land, creating an image that is simultaneously fantastical and realistic. The dialect in The Race, between the imagined and the directly perceived, is precisely what gives the work its epic force. There is a further tension between the iconography - the subject of the painting - and the technique used to depict it. Both iconography and technique are at once descriptive and conceptually significant - conveyers of literal and philosophical meaning. The image of the horse is both a literal representation of a horse and a metaphor for youth, freedom, for emotional release and the imagination.

It is this fusion of the literal and the metaphorical which makes the painting fantastical and mythological in style. Here the viewer witnesses the horse galloping across the foreground chased by a boy and old man. The latter struggles to keep up the pace. The old man's struggle becomes a metaphor for the loss of youth and transience of existence. This fact is made more poignant by the knowledge that the year of this work was the year of the death of Yeats's wife, Mary Cottenham Yeats. Similarly, the viewer sees the paint as a physical element tamed into representing the figurative content of the painting - used to define the composition and the elements within it; indeed the horse becomes a horse as a result of a few carefully placed strokes. However, the very physicality of the paint also carries an emotional significance - the vigorous brushwork manifests the impetuous activity of the artist in applying the paint, taking on an expressive potency; the loose brushwork creating an image that is visually transient.

Yeats is essentially a romantic idealist and The Race demonstrates him communicating these ideas in a multiplicity of ways. The heroic ideas contained with The Race are opened up for contemplation as the conceptual and literal interplay it enshrines is concretely resolved.

Hilary Pyle (loc. cit.) describes the present work as 'a delicate sketch in thick oil of a man, a horse, and a boy'.