The Velvet Strand

Details

Jack Butler Yeats, R.H.A. (1871-1957)
The Velvet Strand
signed 'JACK B YEATS' (lower right) and inscribed 'THE VELVET STRAND' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
18 x 24 in. (45.8 x 61 cm.)
Painted in 1928

Provenance

Miss Honor Hamilton, September 1944, and by descent.

Literature

H. Pyle, Jack B. Yeats A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, I, London, 1992, no. 362, p. 329, illustrated.
Idem., III, p. 154, illustrated.

Exhibited

Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 1928, no. 65.
London, Alpine Club Gallery, Paintings by Jack B. Yeats, June-July 1930, no. 10.
Dublin, National College of Art, Irish Exhibition of Living Art, September-October 1943, no. 114.
Dublin, National College of Art, National Loan Exhibition, June-July 1945, no. 61a.

Special notice

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.

Lot Essay

Hilary Pyle (loc. cit.) comments on the present work, 'The Velvet Strand at Portmarnock north of Dublin, opposite Lambay Island, is so called because of its wide smooth expanse of sand. Yeats delighted in the summer visitors to the Velvet Strand, who were not so welcome to new settlers in the area in the summer of 1926. 'The Velvet Strand was just getting worked up to itself, with the small, and bold, merchants from the hind quarter of the city with whitewashed tents and barrels and goats and big black pots and song and fife and now what do you think? The nice people of Portmarnock in their nasty pinched looking twisting bungalows have wired the strand against these cheery Citizens of Dublin,' he wrote to Thomas MacGreevy (TCD Ms. 8105/7). His painting is a masterly portrait of a tinker on the empty strand, with a woman behind him washing a bucket in the sea, while the tents of the travellers line the sand in mid-distance; presumably painted from memory.'

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