The death of Anne Yeats on July 4th aged 82 probably marks the end of a painting dynasty going back three generations.
Daughter of the poet and niece of the painter Jack Yeats, she had an illustrious patrimony and could also look back to a grandfather, John Butler Yeats, who has been described as the greatest Irish portrait painter.
As an artist she did not reach the heights of her uncle and grandparent, but she earned an honourable niche in the Irish art of a generation ago and was also much liked and respected as an individual.
In an interview which she gave to this paper a number of years ago, Anne Yeats described herself as "a very private person". She had, in fact, a wide circle of friends and was popular with fellow-artists, but in recent years she exhibited very rarely - her one-woman exhibition in 1994 at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin came after years of absence from the public eye.
She was identified above all with the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, not only as a regular exhibitor at its annual shows, but as a member of its committee. The work of selection, organisation and preparation for the IELA exhibitions, as she admitted late in life, took up two whole months of every summer for her - and it was, of course, unpaid work.
As any reader of her father's poems probably will know, she was born on February 2nd, 1919, at a time of violence in Ireland. Her memories of her father were virtually restricted to the last decade of his life and to their house in Rathfarnham, Dublin. He encouraged her wish to be an artist.
She had little idea of how she should go about it, so she wrote to "Uncle Jack" asking him to teach her how to paint. She got back a courteous reply saying he could not do so since he did not know how he painted himself. So instead she attended some classes given by the painter Nevill Johnson, and went to drawing lessons at the old Royal Hibernian Academy schools, where her chief teachers were Dermod O'Brien, PRHA, and Maurice MacGonigal. Her famous uncle, though he would not teach her, bought some of her early paintings and also used to send her cheques regularly.
As a power on the board of the Abbey Theatre, W.B. Yeats "wangled me a job there" as a designer and painter of sets. She worked for five years at the Abbey, some as an assistant to Tanya Moisewitz; and then, in the late 1930s, as a freelance. She did designs for the Olympia and Gaiety theatres and also worked for Austin Clarke's Lyric Theatre. She enjoyed the latter work but found the Abbey constricting because "it got a bit boring, always having to put up the same sets".
Her committal to full-time painting seems to have come relatively late. The Living Art exhibition hung the first painting Anne Yeats had exhibited publicly, and she became virtually a fixture there, showing the annual four pictures permitted to a committee member and also becoming a lynch-pin in its organisational work. She remained in both capacities until the IELA was handed over in the early 1970s to Robert Ballagh, so that a new generation could take it over and run it.
During the 1960s she had two exhibitions at the late Leo Smith's now-vanished Dawson Gallery, which were well received, and her work was also seen in Canada and some other overseas locations. About this time, however, her painting - which varied from figure pieces and semi-humorous depictions of domestic cats, to textural works which verged on abstraction - began gradually to dry up, so to atone she became a regular figure in the old Graphic Studio, which was then situated just opposite her studio-flat in Mount Street.
After trying etching without much success, she turned to lithography and monotypes which she found more satisfying, and her career took off in a new direction.
In her late years she lived very privately in Dalkey, where paintings by her uncle and drawings by her grandfather hung on the walls. And in a smallish room off the hall were bookshelves lined with her father's books, including a whole shelf on coinage, reflecting the time when W.B., as a Free State senator, chaired the commission on a new coinage for this country.
Anne Yeats is survived by her brother Michael.
Anne Yeats: born 1919; died, July 2001