Jack Yeats

Jack Butler Yeats was an Irish painter and author. He was the son of the painter John Butler Yeats and a brother of the poet William Butler Yeats, who won the 1923 Nobel Prize for literature.

In his early years Jack Yeats worked as an illustrator for newspapers and published his first Sherlock Holmes comic in 1894, but in 1906 he moved to oil painting. At the beginning of 20th century he moved to the USA, returning to Ireland in 1910. At the end of the 1920s he had a close friendship with famous Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka and in the 1930s began writing novels and dramas.

He is widely seen as a “National Painter” for his paintings depicting Irish landscapes, horses, circus and travelling players. His style ranged from conventional landscape style to expressionism, from watercolors with limited range of colours to oil paintings, with thick coats of paint.

The work Swimming awarded with silver, actually The Liffey Swim (oil on canvas, 61 x 91 cm), painted by Yeats in 1923, is today in the National Gallery of Ireland. The “Liffey Swim” is a long-distance swim in the river Liffey in Dublin and was first held in 1920. The image shows spectators in the O’Connell Bridge area and was recreated live for the 100th edition in 2019. The painter is said to have immortalized himself and his wife among the spectators. A smaller (46 x 61 cm) oil painting is Before the Start, which shows three jockeys before a race. The 1915 painting is in the National Gallery as well. The The Small Ring, also an oil painting, is part of the inventory of the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork. The 61.0 x 91.5 cm sized painting was created in 1930, probably from sketches made in 1908.