A PAINTING by Jack Butler Yeats, formerly owned by the film actress Vivien Leigh, is to be auctioned at Sothebys in London on May 16th. It is expected to make between £150,000 and £250,000 sterling.
A Farewell To Mayo, painted by Yeats in 1929, was given to her by her husband, the actor Laurence Olivier, partly because of her family connection with Co Mayo.
It was bought in a selling exhibition at the National Gallery in London in 1942. It is now being sold by the Leigh estate.
Vivien Leigh, whose mother was of Irish descent, was then at the height of her fame after winning an Oscar as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind. She spent childhood holidays in Connemara.
The painting depicts the lone emigrant and his driver, hunched in a horse and cart on the crest of a hill at dusk, probably on the way to Galway or Sligo and the boat for America. It was done by Yeats at a time when he began to depart from a direct and realistic style to something more expressionistic in both style and content.
Mark Adams, the Sothebys Irish specialist, said. "This painting represents one of the greatest expressions in Irish art of the universal sensations of helplessness and loss, common to all forced migrants, which were, a bitter part of Irish folk memory in Yeats's time."
The painting will be on show at Newman House, St Stephen's Green, Dublin, on April 17th-20th and at Grey Abbey, Newtownards, Co Down, between April 23rd and 27th. The viewing times are Dublin, weekdays 11a.m.-6p.m. and Saturday 11a.m.-4p.m., Grey Abbey, 10a.m.-4p.m.