Jack Yeats by Bruce Arnold Yale 418pp, £29.95 in UK
This biography comes at a time when Yeats's stock probably stands higher than it ever has done, though in the last two decades of his life he towered over all living Irish painters and almost all English ones as well. Hilary Pyle has already published a perfectly adequate life of him, but in the nature of things Bruce Arnold has taken the subject a stage further and his book is also longer and more elaborately produced.
Yeats was a very private and reticent man, his life had few outstanding incidents, and there is no sex-and-psychobabble angle to it for sensationalists to grasp at. There appears to have been just one woman who mattered much to him, his wife "Cottie", and he was devoted to her for half a century and devastated emotionally by her death. He was involved in no famous quarrels or controversies, joined no art movements, published no manifestos and caused no scandals. This does not, however, mean that he was the kind of Flaubertian artist-solitary who lives only for his work. He served on the usual committees, possessed political as well as aesthetic convictions, had a strong social, gregarious and even sporty side, and showed a considerable gift for friendship.
William Murphy's excellent life of John Butler Yeats lifted the lid off the impoverished Yeats household in London, where Jack was born. A portrait-painter of genius who lacked real self-belief and totally lacked worldly or business sense, and a mother who "couldn't boil an egg" and ended as an embittered invalid withdrawn from life, did not add up to ideal or even adequate parents. Jack was the youngest of the family, and he seems to have been closer to his sister "Lolly" (Elizabeth) than to his other siblings. From the start he drew compulsively, and his father noted that "his drawings were never of one object, one person or one animal, but of groups engaged in some kind of drama".
As with his poet-brother, Jack spent some of his happiest times in Sligo with his maternal grandparents, the Pollexfens. (Near the end of his life, he told the critic Brian O'Doherty that "Sligo made me a painter"). The fascination with riders and horses which marks his work from first to last was fired originally by seeing Buffalo Bill Cody and his travelling circus perform in London.
Understandably, young Jack developed a certain detachment towards his own immediate family, as well as the independence and self-reliance that marked him all his life. Yet he was a steady breadwinner for the household, at a time when his father had proved incapable of supporting even himself. Though his art education was scanty and rather irregular, he made his mark quite quickly as a cartoonist and caricaturist and professional illustrator, and he found patrons and helpers such as Sarah Purser who brought him small commissions. Sporting topics, theatre posters, a new comic journal called Lika Joko - Jack could handle them all, and he always met deadlines and was disciplined in everything he did.
He fled the nest in 1894 by his marriage to Mary Cottingham White, who had been his fellow-student and painted competently in watercolour. Jack himself worked for a long time in the same medium - he was over thirty before he painted regularly in oils. They lived in Devon, in a rural setting which was mirrored in Jack's first exhibition, at the Clifford Gallery in London; this earned him a lifelong supporter in Lady Gregory, and led to many more one-man shows including his first in Dublin. West of Ireland subjects began to appear in his work, and meanwhile his fascination with the stage found an outlet in the miniature theatre he constructed - he gave performances for children - and in the first of his plays.
Yeats's gift for friendship was shown in his closeness to John Masefield, with whom he used to sail toy boats, and in his collaboration with Synge, some of whose work he illustrated. The famous Broadsheets, now collectors' items fetching fancy prices, were a step along the road to self-discovery and also mark his growing involvement with Ireland. In 1907 he told the American lawyer and art collector John Quinn: "Ireland consists of all sorts of people. In fact, it is a nation ready to start at any time." Finally, at nearly forty, he chose to move there with his English wife - probably influenced, as Bruce Arnold says, by his micawberish father's emigration to New York. We tend to think of his career as a steady, almost inevitable rise from early middle age on, but in fact Yeats found it hard to sell his work in Ireland, particularly the oils. The start of the first World War darkened things further, and there is plenty of proof that in the years 1915-16 he suffered something like a nervous breakdown, or at the very least severe and prolonged depression. (Part of the reason for this was the strain of a legal action over the Pollexfen estate, in which he was heavily involved.)
Yeats's emotional involvement in the 1916 Rising and in Irish independence generally has been much debated and discussed. The picture "Bachelor's Walk" and (some years later) "The Funeral of Harry Boland" are authentically moving works, but not necessarily personal statements; Yeats was no political animal or activist. He seems to have been (mildly?) republican in sentiments and he and his poet-brother are known to have differed diametrically in outlook during the Civil War. My own belief is that he felt a deep emotional sympathy with Ireland and with the concept of a liberated, emerging nation, but no man was ever by nature less of a partisan.
In the 1920s he began to move away from the graphic bias and congested tonality of his early period into the brilliant, broken tones and free brushwork of his mature work. Yeats by then had become a central figure in Dublin cultural life, a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy and of the United Arts Club, and the quintessential painter of the city's life and sights. In a literary town and culture, he imposed a radical new element of visual imagination, whose legacy is still active and with us.
Modernism in art was forcing itself upon provincial Dublin, and Yeats was a far less isolated, untypical painter for his time than is usually admitted. His friendship with Kokoschka, for example, was founded around this time - the Austrian Expressionist visited Ireland in 1928 and 1929, as his letters show. Sickert wrote to Yeats in admiration after one of his London exhibitions, and he was also beginning now to be seen abroad, in Rome, Pittsburgh, New York, etc. He also had the vocal support of writers and critics such as Thomas MacGreevy, "AE" and Earnan O'Malley. "Jack B's" personal legend, too, was growing, and the lively, witty, extrovert side of his personality expanded steadily with the growth of his fame.
It is interesting to read that he admired Joyce, though with reservations, and the friendship with young Samuel Beckett has been well documented by now. Even more interesting is the fact that when de Valera and Fianna Fail came to power in 1932, the idea was mooted for a time of creating a Ministry for the Arts with Jack Yeats as the first incumbent. Of course, it came to nothing, since Dev had other fish to fry and other schemes in hand, but at least Yeats became a member of the board of the National Gallery in 1936. When world war came again, John Betjeman and Kenneth Clark became his admirers and in 1942 Clark organised a major exhibition of his work at the National Gallery in London, shared with William Nicholson (father of Ben). It was a big success and was praised by Herbert Read and other influential critics, though the review by Raymond Mortimer which Bruce Arnold quotes reaches heights, or depths, of sheer fatuity. This exhibition was a turning point in his career, and his plays and novels were also finding a new public, though personally I have never been able to read them through.
The advent of Victor Waddington as Dublin's first great art dealer in the modern style was another signpost, since Yeats was freed at last of the chore of selling his own work - though he appears to have been highly efficient at it. (He was always an "organised" man, as was shown even in his neat, rather natty clothes and the tidiness of his studio and his personal habits.) Official honours came, including the Legion of Honour from France: Yeats had become, almost imperceptibly, the Grand Old Man of Irish art.
The death of his wife, however, was a blow from which arguably he did not recover, yet he went on painting. To a friend he confided "I'm finished", but though that was possibly true of the private individual, the artist in him did not give up. Seemingly unable to live alone in their old apartment, he moved into Portobello Nursing Home and stayed there until his own death. He did not, however, retreat entirely from the world and even went to London for a BBC interview; he also kept a taxicab account to make his usual Dublin rounds.
An exhibition in America was a qualified failure, and then Victor Waddington decided - mainly for financial reasons - to move to London, a major loss to Irish art and to Yeats himself. His last words, on his deathbed, were "Goodbye, Anne" to his painter-niece whose hand he held. He was buried alongside Cottie in Mount Jerome, where de Valera was among the mourners.
Bruce Arnold has written what, I presume, will now be the standard life. In an epilogue, he remarks that Yeats was an uneven painter - obviously true, but then artists with a big output usually are (who is more uneven than Picasso?). He is also plainly uneasy with the often overdone stress on Yeats's so-called "Irishness", an area in which it is easy to go astray or be misunderstood. Yet it seems to me an essential element in his work, just as central in fact as Rouault's Catholicism or Chagall's Jewishness is in theirs. To deny or sidestep it is to deprive it of an entire dimension.
Arnold is entirely right to point out that Ireland has had other excellent painters in this century (and of course still has); the fact remains that there is something special and unique about Yeats, and that he occupies a role roughly commensurate with that of his brother in Irish literature. Yeats was no cultural nationalist in the old, narrow sense, yet the fact remains that he did - among other things - give visual form to a new (and old) nation's culture, while projecting his own imaginative inner world with such elan and sensitivity. With him, modern Irish painting finally comes of age and defines itself authoritatively for the first time.
A few minor points: Seumas O'Sullivan's name is persistently mispelled "Seumus". And the words "Sinn Fein" do not (as is often claimed) mean "Ourselves Alone"; they mean simply "We Ourselves".