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拍品專文
On the Way to the Sea is one of more than eighty canvases completed by Yeats in 1948, at the age of seventy seven. Hilary Pyle (Yeats, Portrait of an Artistic Family, London, 1997, p. 260) comments on his later works, 'As he grew older, Yeats's landscapes became progressively more visionary, so that earth, water, air and light seemed all to reach some metaphysical plane where the physical world is allied with the heavenly. The landscapes are still recognizably Irish in their colouring, and in their changeable weather, their wealth of little lakes and streams, and their mountainous hills. But emotionally Yeats seemed to gather up the countryside which he had studied in detail as a young man, and transform through a personal ecstasy this land he loved so deeply. The men and women in these late paintings - the tramps and tinkers and ballad singers and sailors which we are familiar with in earlier works - are transformed too, caught up in the ecstasy of the artist, so that they become one with the landscape. This is a landscape which is capable of any emotion, because all emotion is part of living; and Life is what his painting continues to be about, though now it is a vision of Life which can express the unseen as well as the seen'.
On the Way to the Sea is a joyous image of a happy, dancing boy and a wildly galloping horse capering on either side of a stream flowing through a lush green landscape towards the sea. Bruce Arnold (private correspondence, 2002) comments on the artist's palette in this work, 'The painting, unusually, reveals the artist's capacity with the difficult colour green. He has integrated the tones, which at this late stage in his work were often separated, into a harmonious essay in this most difficult, yet most rewarding colour'. He notes that the horse, whose movement is captured with flourish and bravura, is comparable to Yeats's masterpiece of the previous year, Freedom (private collection; H. Pyle, op. cit., no. 835), in which a flame-coloured horse gallops away from a farmer leaning on his stick.
The horse is one of the most important themes to surface in Yeats's work. His fascination with the horse may be traced back to his upbringing in Sligo, where horses were an integral part of his childhood. As a boy, out of school hours, Yeats arranged donkey races, attended race meetings and experienced the sights of hunts and travelling circuses. His early drawings of horses (the earliest of which was executed when he was just ten years old) illustrate them at races, fairs and out hunting. After his move to London in 1887, the horse came to serve as a reminder of home, symbolising for Yeats all that was free and unrestricted in his childhood. It is this sense of unmitigated freedom which is so striking in On the Way to the Sea.
On the Way to the Sea is a joyous image of a happy, dancing boy and a wildly galloping horse capering on either side of a stream flowing through a lush green landscape towards the sea. Bruce Arnold (private correspondence, 2002) comments on the artist's palette in this work, 'The painting, unusually, reveals the artist's capacity with the difficult colour green. He has integrated the tones, which at this late stage in his work were often separated, into a harmonious essay in this most difficult, yet most rewarding colour'. He notes that the horse, whose movement is captured with flourish and bravura, is comparable to Yeats's masterpiece of the previous year, Freedom (private collection; H. Pyle, op. cit., no. 835), in which a flame-coloured horse gallops away from a farmer leaning on his stick.
The horse is one of the most important themes to surface in Yeats's work. His fascination with the horse may be traced back to his upbringing in Sligo, where horses were an integral part of his childhood. As a boy, out of school hours, Yeats arranged donkey races, attended race meetings and experienced the sights of hunts and travelling circuses. His early drawings of horses (the earliest of which was executed when he was just ten years old) illustrate them at races, fairs and out hunting. After his move to London in 1887, the horse came to serve as a reminder of home, symbolising for Yeats all that was free and unrestricted in his childhood. It is this sense of unmitigated freedom which is so striking in On the Way to the Sea.