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Lot Essay
Hilary Pyle comments on the present work, 'Yeats always found the sea a source of metaphor: and in With the Ebb he develops the theme of The Ebbing Tide (Pyle, no. 826), painted about the time his wife died. With the Ebb has some optimism. The people crowded in the little boat are in shadow but the face of the boatman is lighted up, and they move out to the mouth of the harbour, where the mist is lifted and the sky is blue.
The painting, which is predominantly in the indigo which excited Yeats ('Indigo Height' in New Statesman and Nation, 5 December 1936, Pyle, no. 899), derives from a sketch made by the artist in Sketchbook 200 [125] (1919, 1920) of a ferryboat on the Liffey in Dublin, in which there are about thirty men and boys, some carrying tea cans. In a metaphorical way, the painting seems to encourage the spectator to go with the ebbing tide of life, and not without optimism, because indigo is Yeats's triumphant - spiritualising - colour. 'Such is human apprehension,' says Yeats in The Charmed Life (1938: 27), 'that all these old customers, called to their ebbing tide, will take each a fresh deep draught, against thirst to come' (loc. cit).
The painting, which is predominantly in the indigo which excited Yeats ('Indigo Height' in New Statesman and Nation, 5 December 1936, Pyle, no. 899), derives from a sketch made by the artist in Sketchbook 200 [125] (1919, 1920) of a ferryboat on the Liffey in Dublin, in which there are about thirty men and boys, some carrying tea cans. In a metaphorical way, the painting seems to encourage the spectator to go with the ebbing tide of life, and not without optimism, because indigo is Yeats's triumphant - spiritualising - colour. 'Such is human apprehension,' says Yeats in The Charmed Life (1938: 27), 'that all these old customers, called to their ebbing tide, will take each a fresh deep draught, against thirst to come' (loc. cit).