The Road Beside The River

Hilary Pyle comments on Yeats' later landscapes, 'As he grew older, Yeats' 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 ... 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).