Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
On a Western Quay/ Sligo Quay (1923)
Oil on panel, 23 x 35.5cm (9 x 14”)
Signed

Provenance: Sir Patrick Ford, London; With J. Leger & Son, Old Bond Street, London,...

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
On a Western Quay/ Sligo Quay (1923)
Oil on panel, 23 x 35.5cm (9 x 14”)
Signed

Provenance: Sir Patrick Ford, London; With J. Leger & Son, Old Bond Street, London, November 1942 label verso; Sale, these rooms 16 March 1978, lot 114; Private Collection, Dublin.

Exhibited: Dublin, Stephen’s Green Gallery, April/May 1923, Drawings and Pictures of Life in the West of Ireland, cat. no.24; New York, Society of Independent Artists, Annual Exhibition, March 1924; London, Tooth, Pictures of Irish Life, cat. no. 33; London, Leger Galleries, October 1942, London Group 4th Wartime Exhibition.

Literature: Listener (6 April 1942); Hilary Pyle, A Catalogue Raisonné of The Oil Paintings, Andre Deutsch, 1992, cat. no. 193.

 

Bounded by a spectacular West of Ireland landscape, a sailor leans against a wooden building, its planked construction giving a sense of structure and solidity to the right hand side of the painting. Its starkness makes the surrounding scenery appear even more fantastical.  A high mountain dominates the vista with a large ascendancy house to its left. In the centre huddled along a causeway are a line of comparatively tiny cottages. Hilary Pyle has identified the location as Drumcliffe, the area north of Sligo town, under the shadow of Ben Bulben, where W. B. Yeats was later buried and where the Yeats’s paternal grandfather was once the clergyman.¹ The rugged shaped mountain has also been identified as Knocknarea, to the south of Sligo town, on a note on a label on the reverse.  It is not possible to identify the specific location.  Yeats seems to have exaggerated the details of the view for dramatic effect as he did in many of his later epic paintings such as On Through the Silent Lands (1951, Ulster Museum) and Two Travellers (1942, Tate Gallery), both of which feature similar glacial peaks. Here the juxtaposition of the large house and the sheer limestone cliff face of the mountainside convey a familiar congruence of manmade splendour and the more sublime beauty of nature as it exists in the West of Ireland. This, as in all Yeats’s work, is painted from memory and may combine different elements in the one composition. The details are probably gleaned partly from the perusal of earlier sketches. 

 

The man is dressed in a dark double breasted, marine style jacket and a peaked cap, like that of the pilot, a recurring figure in the work of Yeats. The pilot is based on Michel Gillen, who worked at Rosses Point when Yeats was a child living with his grandparents in Sligo. Gillen’s job was to guide merchant ships from Rosses Point along the Garavogue River to the quayside in Sligo town. The pilot’s job required great skill in navigation and sailing as well as a deep knowledge and understanding of the geography and conditions of the Garavogue and its environs. He appears in several of Yeats’s drawings and paintings, often in or near the Pilot House, a look-out hut, which was located on the headland at Rosses Point, and from where he could watch for the arrival of ships into the river mouth. In a contemporary work, Pilot Comes Ashore, (1923, Private Collection) the pilot stands on a quay in front of Knocknarea.² In Sligo Quay, he appears as an outsider in the depths of the countryside, his pose retaining a nautical stance. 

 

This solitary male figure in an expansive landscape that moves between water and mountain becomes a major theme in Yeats’s later work. Here the traveller is the pilot man who waits patiently for his boat to arrive rather than the nomads of the later work. He contemplates the incoming tide instead of the magnificent landlocked world beside him. The mixture of the building types in this space – the large colonial mansion and modest dwellings - denotes the complex history of rural Ireland. When the painting was made in 1923, the conflict generated by this past was raging throughout the land, and the solemn pose of the figure and the quiet calm of the view could be seen to reflect contemporary political and social tension. It shares the clarity of vision, psychological intensity, and rich colour with such other work of this period as the Island Funeral (1923, Model Sligo), Liffey Swim (1923, NGI) and Early Morning, Glasnevin (1923, Private Collection). 

 

The stone bollard on the quayside demarcates the foreground of the painting. Its solid form casts a shadow across the stone blocks of the quay, leading to the pilot. Touches of red in the sky suggest the slow dissent of the sun which casts its intense light on the gables of the houses and on the mountain cliffs in the distance, also heightened in red tones. Movement is conveyed by the blue turquoise torrent of the water and the cloud strewn sky above, a subtle indication of change and energy in the otherwise tranquil scene. 

 

The painting was exhibited in Dublin in 1923, at the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1924, at the Goupil Gallery, London in 1925 and in the Leger Galleries in London in 1942.  It belonged to the Scottish politician and art collector, Sir Patrick Ford for many years. 

 

Dr Róisín Kennedy (July 2023) 

 

H.Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil paintings, l, p.169 H.Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil paintings, l, p.170      

 

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