THE opening of the Yeats Museum at the National Gallery of Ireland is long overdue. Yeats's star - that's Jack, of course, not the more famous William - has been steadily in the ascendant, particularly over the last decade. There have been a clutch of national and international exhibitions, growing interest on the part of collectors leading to rising prices at auction, and much scholarly attention, including Bruce Arnold's biography, published last year. Yet, despite the rising level of interest, it is also true to say that the artist remains, on the international stage, a relatively minor figure, and it is by no means a sure thing that he will make it into the big league.
Not that it matters, but there is a real feeling that such international recognition is his due, for he is now regarded by many people as the Irish artist, as being the one genius that we have produced in the visual arts. In this context alone the opening of the Yeats Museum is a milestone in our treatment of him. As the Museum's Curator and foremost expert on his work, Hilary Pyle, observes, it should also contribute significantly towards the growth of his reputation.
It is ironic that the improvement in his fortunes has effectively put his pictures, when offered in the marketplace, beyond the means of the National Gallery, or any other public institution. Unless, that is, they are donated. The Museum is a logical place for work to be. The painter's niece, Anne Yeats, has been extremely generous here, donating his archive to the Gallery, including his numerous sketchbooks, which are an extraordinary treasure trove in themselves. Just a few items from this archive are as yet on view in the Museum. More will follow, but the material is available for study by arrangement - and at some stage a show devoted to the sketchbooks must be on the cards.
The Gallery has long laid claim to having the most important single collection of work by Yeats (though it's not numerically great given that he was quite prolific) and, though all the watercolours are not on view, the Museum display offers a reasonable opportunity to assess the claim. It holds up quite well. The collection certainly features a number of absolutely key works. These include one very welcome addition, on loan from the painter's nephew Michael B. Yeats, the watercolour Memory Harbour, an extraordinary little image into which he managed to cram many of the most important elements of the Sligo of his youth.
His years in Sligo, in the care of his maternal grandparents, after his mother became seriously ill, were happy and formative. Memory Harbour is a bird's eye view of Rosses Point, including a recurrent motif in his early work, the Metal Man, the statue standing on a pedestal in the harbour as a guide to navigation. Sligo gave him his appetite for spectacle, for the horse races and public gatherings, the circus of everyday life that dominates his output, and it provided him with his emblematic western landscape, one to which he returned again and again.
Of the oils, Before the Start, a horse racing scene from 1915 with a big silvery grey sky, is outstanding. His beautiful, low-key scenes of Dublin life from the 1920s are represented by such fine works as In the Tram and the well-known The Liffey Swim. About to Write a Letter, from 1935, is a masterpiece, a very striking painting that amounts to a brilliant contemporary treatment of the epistolary subjects favoured by Vermeer and Metsu. It is undoubtedly one of Yeats's very best works.
His ability to find mythic resonance in essentially prosaic subject matter is evident in Men of Destiny from 1946, an allegory of Ireland's future as much as its past. The Man from Aranmore is another iconic watercolour. The mythic West of Ireland is again evoked in Many Ferries, which transcends its literal narrative. Horses have a special place in Yeats's world, and The Singing Horseman, The Cavalier's Farewell to his Steed and For the Road are prime examples. The humour of The Cavalier's Farewell is exceptional - he's saying farewell to a fairground merry-go-round horse, not a proud Arab stallion. It's also Yeats at his most elliptical and contrary. The picture is a kind of visual telegram, just a few broad descriptive strokes.
This Grand Conversation Under the Rose, which depicts a glamorous circus rider and a clown relaxing in the wings, is an emotionally charged subject that has a characteristically chilly feel. It's interesting not least because it illustrates Brian Kennedy's observation on the lack of sensuality in Yeats's work. Despite the dramas, the highly charged atmosphere of his paintings from about the mid-1920s, his people are remarkably unphysical.
As for the thorny question of his position in Irish art and his influence on Irish artists. The conventional view is that he was a one-off. Certainly he didn't give rise to a school of followers. He has had some imitators but no peers. The Dutch curator Rudi Fuchs identifies him with a lineage of artistic outsiders in the chronicle of 20th century painting, individualists who make an important contribution but who do not fit in. Oskar Kokoschka is also on that list, and it is well known that he was a fan of Yeats. There are obvious affinities between their styles.
His influence on Gerald Davis is overt. Early in his career, Sean McSweeney was compared to Yeats, but the similarities are superficial. Though he did paint some landscapes, Yeats was not really a landscape painter. Landscape set a scene for him, provided a backdrop, was literally a bit of a stage set. Increasingly the landscapes became stylised and symbolic in his pictures. Yet looking at the work in the Museum, some affiliations become apparent.
His oil painting technique in the early 1920s has a lot in common with Eithne Jordan's: muted colours, leisurely strokes inscribed in a wet greyish skin of pigment. And the remarkable crowd scenes, Above the Fair and Grief suggest strong associations with some of Michael Cullen's work. Cullen too likes theatrical mise en scenes and has used the circus as an allegory for life. We know that Yeats loved public gatherings like races and fairs, but Above the Fair - a terrific painting - is exceptional in that it is actually very dark, literally and figuratively. This particular jostling mass of humanity is as much hellish as celebratory.
The National Gallery happens to possess a large number of works by Jack's father, John Butler Yeats, and they form an important strand of the Museum display. The general view of him is that he was a conservative artist who could never have adjusted stylistically to the developments in 20th century art.
That is true, but it's also true that he was an extremely good portrait painter with a real sense of history. He approached portraiture in a way that goes back to Rembrandt (evident in his late self-portrait, now on public view for the first time in the Museum), not just stylistically, but in terms of his warmth towards his subjects. He captures a real sense of life in his sitters. In this, though it is ostensibly more conservative, his work is fresher and less dated than the fashionable products of Orpen or Lavery, which are very much of their time. Yeats's portraits seem by comparison direct and unaffected.
The Yeats Museum, located in the former Icon Room, off the Shaw Room in the Dargan Wing of the National Gallery, is open to the public during gallery hours.
