Jack Butler Yeats, R.H.A. (1871-1957)

Hilary Pyle (loc. cit.) comments on the present work: 'A dining hall, with a night landscape visible through the arched windows to the right. A uniformed man decorated with medals joins in a duet with the woman standing beside him, while the figures scattered about the long table listen. Rich colours, enhanced with chrome and vermilion impasto, describe the scene, drawing on a lightly stained canvas.

The 'memory' of a Joycean occasion derives from a dream as well as from actual memory, a dream which Yeats had been exploring in his drawings from 1916 and which was one of the origins of the rich fantasy that invades his painting and writing from this period on'.