Jack Butler Yeats RHA | Expressionist painter | Tutt'Art@ | Pittura * Scultura * Poesia * Musica

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (29 August 1871 - 28 March 1957) was an Irish artist and Olympic medalist. W. B. Yeats was his brother.

Butler's early style was that of an illustrator; he only began to work regularly in oils in 1906.

His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland - especially of his boyhood home of Sligo.

Yeats's work contains elements of Romanticism.

He later would adopt the style of Expressionism.

Biography

Yeats was born in London, England. He was the youngest son of Irish portraitist John Butler Yeats and the brother of W. B. Yeats, who received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature.

He grew up in Sligo with his maternal grandparents, before returning to his parents' home in London in 1887.

Yeats attended the Chiswick School of Art with his sisters Elizabeth and Susan, learning "Freehand drawing in all its branches, practical Geometry and perspective, pottery and tile painting, design for decorative purposes – as in Wall-papers, Furniture, Metalwork, Stained Glass".

Early in his career, Yeats worked as an illustrator for magazines like the Boy's Own Paper and Judy, drew comic strips, including the Sherlock Holmes parody "Chubb-Lock Homes" for Comic Cuts, and wrote articles for Punch under the pseudonym "W. Bird".

In 1894 he married Mary Cottenham, also a native of England and two years his senior, and resided in Wicklow according to the Census of Ireland, 1911.

From around 1920, he developed into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism.

He was sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause, but not politically active.

However, he believed that 'a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints', and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helped articulate a modern Dublin of the 20th century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man.

Samuel Beckett wrote that "Yeats is with the great of our time... because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence".

The Marxist art critic and author John Berger also paid tribute to Yeats from a very different perspective, praising the artist as a "great painter" with a "sense of the future, an awareness of the possibility of a world other than the one we know".

His favourite subjects included the Irish landscape, horses, circus and travelling players.

His early paintings and drawings are distinguished by an energetic simplicity of line and colour, his later paintings by an extremely vigorous and experimental treatment of often thickly applied paint.

He frequently abandoned the brush altogether, applying paint in a variety of different ways, and was deeply interested in the expressive power of colour.

Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the 20th century (and the first to sell for over £1m), he took no pupils and allowed no one to watch him work, so he remains a unique figure.

The artist closest to him in style is his friend, the Austrian painter, Oskar Kokoschka.

In 1943 he accepted Victor Waddington as his sole dealer and business manager. Waddington played a crucial role in his career and reputation.

Besides painting, Yeats had a significant interest in theatre and in literature. He was a close friend of Samuel Beckett.

He designed sets for the Abbey Theatre, and three of his own plays were also produced there.

His literary works include The Careless Flower, The Amaranthers (much admired by Beckett), Ah Well, A Romance in Perpetuity, And To You Also, and The Charmed Life.

Yeats's paintings usually bear poetic and evocative titles.

He was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916.

He died in Dublin in 1957, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.

Yeats holds the distinction of being Ireland's first medalist at the Olympic Games in the wake of creation of the Irish Free State.

At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Yeats' painting The Liffey Swim won a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games.

In the competition records the painting is simply entitled Swimming.

Works

In November 2010, one of Yeats's works, A Horseman Enters a Town at Night, painted in 1948 and previously owned by novelist Graham Greene, sold for nearly £350,000 at a Christie's auction in London.

A smaller work, Man in a Room Thinking, painted in 1947, sold for £66,000 at the same auction.

His painting Sleep Sound (1955) was bought by David Bowie in 1993 for £45,500 and sold at auction in 2016 for £233,000.

In 1999 the painting, The Wild Ones, had sold at Sotheby's in London for over £1.2m.

Whyte's Auctioneers hold the world record sale price for a Yeats painting, Reverie (1931), which sold for €1,400,000 in November 2019.

The Model, Home of The Niland Collection, in Sligo cares for one of the best and most extensive collections of Jack B. Yeats work in existence.

It presents regular curated exhibitions of his work, notably, The Outside in 2011, Enter the Clowns - The Circus as Metaphor, 2013; The Music has Come, 2014; Painted Universe, 2018; Salt Water Ballads, 2021. | Source: © Wikipedia

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) è stato un pittore Irlandese.

Jack Butler Yeats nacque il 29 agosto 1871 a Londra, figlio del ritrattista irlandese John Butler Yeats e fratello del poeta William Butler Yeats.

Passò gli anni dell'infanzia a Sligo, una città sul mare nel nord dell'Irlanda, dai nonni materni.

Nel 1887 si trasferì a Londra per studiare arte, dove ben presto cominciò a lavorare per diversi giornali in qualità di illustratore.

Queste collaborazioni influirono molto sul suo stile iniziale, che è quello tipico di un illustratore e quasi di un fumettista, con pitture e disegni caratterizzati da una energica semplicità della linea e del colore.

Verso la fine degli anni '90 rivolse la sua attenzione alla pittura ad olio ed agli acquerelli, creando opere che sono semplici rappresentazioni liriche di figure e paesaggi irlandesi, ispirate dai ricordi dell'infanzia e della gioventù.

Influenzato dall'impressionismo francese ed in parte dal romanticismo, questi lavori sono basati sulla fine osservazione della realtà e su una brillante tecnica di disegno.

Nel 1910 ritornò in Irlanda, dove rimase per il resto della vita. A partire dal 1920 circa, lo stile di Yeats si evolse verso un intenso espressionismo, che talvolta sconfina nel simbolismo, con il tratto estremamente vigoroso ed il colore applicato in modo marcato. Negli anni 30 fu uno degli amici più assidui e solleciti di Samuel Beckett, che all'epoca versava in condizioni critiche sia a Dublino che a Parigi.

Per la ricerca del potere espressivo del colore si ispirò al pittore austriaco Oskar Kokoschka, per il quale nutriva profonda ammirazione.

Le opere di questo periodo cercano di rappresentare non più le immagini dei suoi ricordi, ma le emozioni che provava a ricordare gli eventi del suo passato.

Era sua intenzione sia esprimere i sentimenti di solitudine e di difficoltà dell'individuo moderno che far crescere una coscienza popolare e moderna dell'Irlanda del Ventesimo Secolo: anche se non fu mai politicamente attivo, Yeats provò simpatia per la causa repubblicana irlandese.

Nel 1924 vinse la medaglia d'argento ai Giochi della VIII Olimpiade nella categoria Pittura.

Oltre alla pittura, Yeats fu autore di scritti ed opere teatrali.

Malgrado fosse uno dei pittori irlandesi più importanti del Ventesimo Secolo, non prese studenti e non permise a nessuno di vederlo lavorare, rimanendo così una figura per certi versi enigmatica.