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Lot Essay
Hilary Pyle (loc. cit.) comments on the present work, 'A figure sits in the shade of a shelter in a landscape that is eloquent with colour'.
'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, and 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' (H. Pyle, Yeats Portrait of an Artistic Family, London, 1997, p. 260).
'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, and 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' (H. Pyle, Yeats Portrait of an Artistic Family, London, 1997, p. 260).