Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
On the Skibbereen Light Railway (1924/5)
Oil on panel, 23 x 36cm (9 x 14'')
Signed; also signed and inscribed verso

Provenance: Sold to Victor Waddington as...

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
On the Skibbereen Light Railway (1924/5)
Oil on panel, 23 x 36cm (9 x 14'')
Signed; also signed and inscribed verso

Provenance: Sold to Victor Waddington as a present for Leo Smith in 1940; Michael Scott, Dublin; St. Mary's College, Emo; Private Collection.

Exhibited: 1925 London, Catalogue No.19; 1925 Dublin, Catalogue No. 4; and 1927 Cork.

Literature: Hilary Pyle, 'Jack. B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings', No.274.

The narrow gauge Skibbereen Railway ran for over fifteen miles from Schull to Skibbereen. It closed in 1947. Jack Yeats visited the area and sketched there in 1919-20. Several of his sketchbooks dated 1915-20 record the people and landscape of the region. In one he noted the traditional shawls and long dresses that the women wore, rather like that of the female passenger in the centre of this painting. She takes on a ghostly, almost menacing demeanour, as she stares out across her crowded companions. The severity of her costume and the pallor of her complexion contrast with that of the corpulent and ruddy-faced gentleman seated beside her. He wears a flamboyant blue jacket and cravat, and appears to be dozing. To his right another passenger with hands clenched in front of him appears to be in deep conversation. In the background against the large window other passengers appear to settling themselves on to the train for the journey ahead. Their forms are silhouetted against a spectacular view of the sky and coastline of West Cork.

 

Yeats painted many paintings of trains and trams, especially during the 1920s. The subject allowed him to explore the interaction between people, often of different social classes, ages and genders, in close physical proximity. It also enabled him to scrutinize the dynamism of modern life as extolled through the comparatively speedy transportation of the populace through the countryside or the city.

 

The painting was exhibited along with other train scenes, such as Music on the Train, (1923, Private Collection) and Singing, Had I the Wings of a Swallow, (1925, Private Collection) at the Engineers Hall, Dublin in October 1925. The work was also included in another Yeats one-man exhibition at the Arthur Tooth Gallery in London in March 1925. Both shows were critically acclaimed, with one critic proclaiming Yeats as the most truly national of all our painters  He depicts Life as he sees it, not as told by others.

 

Previous owners of On the Skibbereen Light Railway include Leo Smith, the founder of the Dawson Gallery and great champion of Yeatss work, and the modernist architect, Michael Scott. The painting is a superb example of how Yeats used painting to depict the encroachment of modernity on the Irish landscape and in the social fabric of the country.

 

Róisín Kennedy, August 2019

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