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Lot 89AR

Jack Butler Yeats
(Irish, 1871-1957)
Single File 22.9 x 35.6 cm. (9 x 14 in.)

15 June 2016, 15:00 BST
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £80,500 inc. premium

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Jack Butler Yeats (Irish, 1871-1957)

Single File
signed 'JACK B/YEATS' (lower right) and titled 'SINGLE/FILE' (verso)
oil on board
22.9 x 35.6 cm. (9 x 14 in.)
Painted in 1949

Footnotes

Provenance
With The Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin
Private Collection

Literature
Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Volume II, Andre Deutsch, London, 1992, p.892, cat.987

The nomadic outsider walking through a barren landscape is the major theme of Jack B. Yeats's late work. Paintings like Two Travellers (1942, Tate), Glory (1951, Private Collection) and Single File focus on chance encounters and temporary companionship on the open road. In Single File three figures walk in a Spartan setting, their bodies silhouetted against a pale expanse of sky. Led by a golden haired child the three appear both destitute and strangely anachronistic. While independent of each other they are also companions as they head in the same direction. The child appears in several other works including Glory and Grief (1951, National Gallery of Ireland) where it takes on a religious Christ-like symbolism.

The absence of buildings and landmarks elevates this strange journey to a metaphysical or even existential level. Painted four years after the end of World War Two the subject resonates with the disruption of that conflict and equally with the devastation and upheaval wrought by Irish history. The terrain is inspired by the West of Ireland. But Yeats's figures express more universal ideas of human nature, one that was deployed to great effect by his friend, Samuel Beckett. The endless walking back and forth through the landscape is a metaphor for life itself.

The travellers are sculpted out of paint, using largely the same greens and blues as the ground on which they walk. This treatment makes them appear as ethereal ghostly presences in the landscape but is also suggestive of the way in which light and shadow impacts on our perception of solid form. This ambiguity is heightened by the fact that parts of the figures are painted in the same ashen colour as the sky. The use of vibrant red and yellow in the depiction of the child is suggestive of evening light and perhaps a night's rest or some break in the journey ahead.

We are grateful to Dr. Róisín Kennedy for compiling this catalogue entry.

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