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

Hilary Pyle writes of this work 'Yeats attended 'flapping' meetings, or unofficial races, on his yearly visits to Ireland from his home in Devon during the early years of this century, sketching horses and local characters. Later he returned to his sketchbooks for subjects, and this oil of 1926 is probably a half memory of one of these events.
His style had undergone a distinct change during the previous two years, abandoning a distinctive narrative outline for an extempore approach, where he sketches rapidly on a prepared canvas, laying in colour beside colour. The mood has become highly subjective and emotional, filled with an overt sensitivity to the tangibility of the landscape and atmosphere. Colours are dark or brilliant and rich; and the artist embues the scene, which after all is little more than a group beside a mobile stall watching a horseman in full gallop against a western landscape, with an element of something beyond the actual'.
(private correspondence, March 1996).