Beschreibung:

CHRISTMAS IN HENRY STREET (1945) Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
Signature: signed upper right; inscribed in another hand and with the original Waddington framing label on reverse Medium: oil on panel Dimensions: 24 by 37cm., 9.5 by 14.5in. Provenance: Sold by the artist to Serge Philipson, a renowned Dublin collector, in 1945; F. L. Vickerman; Private collection Literature: Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Andre Deutsch, London, 1992, Vol. II, p.606, catalogue no. 664 This powerful work, with its strong colours and striking contrasts, dates from a seminal year in the artist’s life. 1945 was the year of the great retrospective exhibition of his work, held in the Nat... tional College of Art, then in Kildare Street. He was too much a revolutionary for the show to be housed in the National Gallery. He was too technically advanced for the rather dated environment of the Municipal Gallery, as it then was. No, Jack Yeats was rightly shown among students and in the same place as the newly launched annual Irish Exhibition of Living Art which he so appropriately espoused. He was approaching his 65th year. He was celebrating at the same time his golden wedding anniversary. He was the epitome of Modernism. Above all, he was in the floodtide of his late period, full of energy, rich in output and contemplating with calm courage the challenges of old age. He was just over halfway through his total output of paintings. During that energetic year he produced no less than eighty works in oil and roughly the same number in the following year. More than sixty followed in 1947 and a greater number than that in 1948, when another eighty works came from his studio. Many of these are great canvases. The last of 1948 We Left Our Name on the Road of Fame being a joyful masterpiece that summarised the high spirits in which he performed as a painter at this time. Christmas in Henry Street relates, as do so many of Yeats’s paintings, to children and their entertainment. He and Cottie never had children. Yet from the earliest years of their marriage, soon sadly in 1947 to be ended by Cottie’s death, love of children had been expressed in many works. Some are designed as entertainment of children, some, like The Little Sister of the Gang describe how children entertain themselves. Christmas in Henry Street is richly evocative of the simplicity and excitement of Christmas on a Dublin street. As Hilary Pyle has pointed out, the scene for the painting was sketched by the artist just two years earlier, in 1943, and is annotated with words that could have been drawn from the language of the Jazz Age. “OK Baby” and “Daddy me again, Bill Boy” are phrases from which he drew the colourful authority of the three figures in the canvas. Ownership of a work is part of the hall-marking of Yeats paintings. Yeats sold this canvas, in the year it was painted, to Serge Phillipson. He was one of the group of Jack Yeats’s friends known as “The Three Musketeers”. The others were Louis Jammet and his dealer, Victor Waddington. As everyone knows, there was a fourth figure of Dumas’ story, the dashing young d’Artagnan. He also existed among the friends in the person of Howard Robinson. It could be said that they bought the best of Yeats’s pictures. This one went on to become the property of F.L. Vickerman, another early and substantial collector of Yeats paintings. Though small, the work has a jewel-like integrity. Bruce Arnold, Author of Jack Yeats, Yale University Press, 1998 Dublin, March 200 more