Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871 - 1957)
The Old Landing Place (1943)
Oil on board, 23 x 35cms (9 x 14")
Signed

Provenance: Sold in 1943 by The Victor Waddington Galleries to Leslie Dacus

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871 - 1957)
The Old Landing Place (1943)
Oil on board, 23 x 35cms (9 x 14")
Signed

Provenance: Sold in 1943 by The Victor Waddington Galleries to Leslie Dacus

Exhibited: Jack B Yeats Exhibition, The Victor Waddington Galleries London, Apr/May 1971, Catalogue No. 10

Jack B Yeats Centennial Exhibition, Cole Kerr Gallery New York, November 1971, Catalogue No. 6

Literature: A Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings by Hilary Pyle, Catalogue No. 557, page 512 (Vol 1)

The Old Landing Place is one of a number of small panel paintings that Yeats made of Co. Sligo in 1943. These include From Knocknarea Sligo, Nearing the Town (Sligo) and The Rock Pool. Painted from memory these works are part of the artists ongoing exploration of place as it exists in the imagination. He wrote that No one creates  the artist assembles memories.(i) Largely confined to his Dublin studio in the 1940s, Yeats relied on collections of photographs in newspaper cuttings and postcards as well as earlier sketchbooks to compose these paintings. Rather than direct transcription of existing images, Yeats reworked the motifs through his memory of specific locations and through his imagination. This particular scene has not been identified although it is likely to be of Sligo and possibly Enniscrone, known for its salt water baths.

The painting shows a now dilapidated jetty extending out into blue waters. The trace of islands and neighbouring shores in the near distance encloses the composition. A rock is visible above the waterline. Its position in front of the jetty draws the eye out towards the nearby coastlines and subtly evokes the peculiar space of this vista. A poster on the gable wall of the building in the right foreground refers to morning sailings. This and the sign for salt water baths adds a note of modernity to the painting and adds to the sense of time passing and its inevitable consequences. The placing of these incidental signs at extremes of the composition, whose centre is the empty space of the sea, further encourages a sense of movement. It as if the scene was merely glanced at by the passer by and its true significance discovered through the process of remembering and recreating it.

Like many of Yeatss later works this deals with change, in this case the remnants of a busy transition point that is now vacant and unused. The motif of the landing place further suggests the idea of metaphorical journeys rather than physical ones. Yeatss sketchbooks and oil paintings record many such poignant locations. They function as personal reminders of the artists own mortality and ageing process and that of the viewers also. The absence of figures in this work enables the wooden scaffolding of the jetty and the tall red of the salt water baths sign to take on the appearance of an empty stage set without its performers. (Yeats was active as a playwright as well as a painter in this period when his plays Harlequins Positions and La La Noo were staged in the Peacock and Abbey Theatres in 1939 and 1942 respectively.)

1943 was an important one for Yeatss career. The Dublin gallerist, Victor Waddington began dealing in his work and he held the first of several successful one man shows in his gallery that year. It was also the year that Yeats participated in the inaugural Irish Exhibition of Living Art. The Old Landing Place was sold privately by Waddington to the businessman Leslie Dacus who also acquired other important work by Yeats.

Dr. Róisín Kennedy
August 2015

i) Quoted in Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats. A Catalogue Raisonné of the oil paintings, André Deutsch, 1992, I, xlix.

 

 

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