Lot Essay
Horses to Yeats symbolised his youth and all things free and unrestricted about his childhood spent in County Sligo. In this picture the horse gallops away and the frail old man on the right rattles a hat full of dry bones to try to attract the independent beast. Yeats was nearly seventy when he painted this picture but he is still clutching onto his memories of his youth, but for how much longer, since the old man cannot hope to tether the horse. In the later pictures, 'My Beautiful, My Beautiful', of 1953, and 'Horse without a Rider' of 1954, the horse becomes almost translucent, blending into the landscape and returning to the 'Tir na Nog' (the land of constant youth).