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

Hilary Pyle (loc. cit.) comments on the present work, 'The Velvet Strand at Portmarnock north of Dublin, opposite Lambay Island, is so called because of its wide smooth expanse of sand. Yeats delighted in the summer visitors to the Velvet Strand, who were not so welcome to new settlers in the area in the summer of 1926. 'The Velvet Strand was just getting worked up to itself, with the small, and bold, merchants from the hind quarter of the city with whitewashed tents and barrels and goats and big black pots and song and fife and now what do you think? The nice people of Portmarnock in their nasty pinched looking twisting bungalows have wired the strand against these cheery Citizens of Dublin,' he wrote to Thomas MacGreevy (TCD Ms. 8105/7). His painting is a masterly portrait of a tinker on the empty strand, with a woman behind him washing a bucket in the sea, while the tents of the travellers line the sand in mid-distance; presumably painted from memory.'