John Butler Yeats RHA (1839-1922)
Portrait of Master Milo Ryan
Oil on canvas, 66 x 51cm (26 x 20) Unframed
Exhibited: Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 1903, No. 100

Provenance: The sitters...

John Butler Yeats RHA (1839-1922)
Portrait of Master Milo Ryan
Oil on canvas, 66 x 51cm (26 x 20) Unframed
Exhibited: Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 1903, No. 100

Provenance: The sitters family, by descent.

Yeats completed a number of intriguing portraits of children throughout his career. Beginning with his own offspring, he made multiple sketches of their early years, a particularly touching example is a drawing of the infant W.B Yeats asleep in the family home. Portraits of children are challenging for an artist, as they are faced with a subject whose personality is not yet fully defined. However, this is part of their charm.

Though we do not know the exact age of the sitter, Master Milo Ryan looks to be around eight or nine when the portrait was completed. Yeats chooses to depict him standing, with an open book in hand as if he was just in the process of reading a passage out to us. Yeats has painted the young boy in a strong light, which throws up the details of his formal attire. Dressed in a suit jacket, with a shirt and tie, the clothes feel as if they are too big for him, the triangles of the shirt collars extending out over his narrow shoulders. The face is beautifully rendered especially the large brown eyes of his sitter, which express a sensitivity, a youthfulness behind the somewhat formal composition. Working from an almost black background, Yeats introduces colour through flashes of white, pink and blue highlights. The pages of the book appear as dabs of paint, which Yeats, using the end of a brush scrapes a line through to suggest the folds in the paper. Despite the dark colour tones, there is warmth to the boys features, the pink and orange highlights of his flushed cheeks. Milo Ryan, was born on June 7th, 1892 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He served with the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Great War, taking a permanent commission as Captain in 1919 and becoming a Major in 1927. He died at Lahore on December 4th, 1936 at the age of 44.

We know that this work was included in the Royal Hibernian Academy annual exhibition in 1903, so presumably it was painted around this time. This was a busy year for Yeats; he had been commissioned by Hugh Lane to paint twenty portraits of figures from the Irish cultural milieu for his modern art gallery. Lane had also helped Yeats secure his old studio at no. 7 St Stephens Green in Dublin. John Quinn, an American lawyer turned art collector visited Ireland the year previously and purchased from Yeats his portrait of his son William, which is now part of the NGI collection. He also requested a further three portraits of John OLeary, Douglas Hyde and George Russell. The portrait of AE was not finished until 1903 and he persuaded Quinn to let him enter it into the annual RHA exhibition.

One would not consider Yeats to be a society portrait painter, in the traditional sense, in that he did not make significant money from the commissions. He painted people he knew, family friends and relatives, fellow artists and writers. As a result they feel familiar, more personal than traditional portraits of the period. There is a sense of kinship between the artist and his subjects, in which he is gently probing at a further understanding of their personality and Yeats once remarked The best portraits will be painted where the relation of the sitter and the painter is one of friendship. His portraits often have a sense of being unfinished, quick sketch like brushstrokes move across the canvas. It seems the artist did not want to produce static, conventional portraits in which the sitter is frozen in time, but rather allow them to act as enquiries into the personality and thoughts of his subjects who, as with all human beings, young and old, were ever evolving.

Niamh Corcoran, September 2019

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