Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 29th April 2019

60 47 Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) The Circus (1919) signed lower right watercolour, pen and ink on paper 20.5 x 17.5cm (8 x 7in) Provenance: Sotheby’s London, The Irish Sale,18th May 2000: Lot 141; Wellesley Ashe Gallery, Dublin (framing label verso); Brock Fine Art, Dublin (stamp verso); Private Collection Literature: Dublin, Mills Hall, 1919, No.20 [Pyle 1271] €12,000-€18,000 ($13,483-$20,224) (£10,169-£15,254) Born in Fitzroy Road, London in 1857, and fostered by his grandparents in Sligo between the ages of eight and fourteen, from an early age Jack Yeats became a talented ‘jack of all trades’, producing accomplished watercolours, illustrations for periodicals, plays for miniature theatre, and ballads for broadsheets. He also sketched anything that attracted his eye, filling sketchbooks with brilliant, quick, descriptive drawings. As a child in Sligo he fell in love with the sights and sounds of the travelling circuses that visited the town, and back in London he often visited Buffalo Bill’s travelling show at Earl’s Court. This affection stayed with him throughout his life, and the circus, and performers, are abiding reference points not only in his paintings but also in his plays and books. Aged fourteen, Yeats returned from his grandparents in Sligo to London in 1887, to attend art college. Seven years later, he and fellow- student Mary Cottenham White were married and set up house in Devon. Yeats was painting almost exclusively in watercolour at this time, and exhibitions of his work were held regularly in London and Dublin. In 1910, he and Cottie left England to settle permanently in Ireland, where he devoted increasing amounts of time to painting in oils. Two years later Life in the West of Ireland , a book with text and illustrations by Yeats, was published. One of the illustrations, The Circus Poster, shows a boy gazing at a large bill poster pasted onto the wall of a house.. In 1915 Yeats sketched a travelling circus at Arklow, in Co. Wicklow. He was drawn to social, commercial, cultural and political life, but often veiled his own views and thoughts, expressing them obliquely in scenes from fairs, racetracks and circuses. In this ink and watercolour drawing, a group of clowns enter the circus tent, or ‘big top’. To the left, the audience are ranged in tiered wooden seating. The audience are in shadow, while the clowns and performers entering from the right are a colourful motley crew, dressed in striped costumes and wearing hats and headdresses. The atmosphere however is not one of light entertainment. The blue- suited clown in the centre looks out directly at the viewer, his expression glum. He has his hands in his pockets, as if going through the motions of entertaining. To his right, a smaller clown appears to cower back in fear. Amongst the audience can be seen some of Yeats’s stock characters, not least the dark-eyed bearded man, representing the outsider, that appears in so many of his works. By using the circus as a metaphorical space, Yeats look at class and society in his work, without causing direct offence, or being labelled either left-wing or right-wing. In one of his early ink drawings, two men look at a circus poster announcing “Professor Clinker on Thundercloud will jump over a dinner party” The diners are depicted drinking champagne, while the working men in the street ponder on the division between haves and have-nots. Yeats was an avid theatre-goer, and a keen playwright. 1932 he wrote Apparitions, a short play in which the stage settings are specific: the play was to take place with the audience seated around a central ring, as in a circus: Yeats saw in the ring an arena that mirrored life outside the big top, while the circus performers parodied the struggles of everyday life. In his novel Ah Well , set in a small town in the West of Ireland, the circus comes to town, causing excitement amongst the citizenry. Yeats was always ambivalent about the circus; on the one hand he saw it as innocent fun and entertainment, but on the other he sensed underlying anxieties and traumas being acted out by clowns in front of audiences. This sense of unease is expressed most clearly in his painting Johnny Patterson Singing Bridget Donohue (The Singing Clown) 1928 (Model Arts Centre, Sligo) which depicts a singer in a touring circus—ostensibly a cheerful scene. However, Patterson, who was originally from Feakle and had served in the British army, was seen as controversial when touring with his circus in Ireland, as he pleaded for understanding between nationalists and unionists. Patterson was singing “Do Your Best for One Another” in Tralee in 1889, when a fight broke out amongst the audience and he died of injuries received in the riot. Other paintings by Yeats of the big top include his 1906 A Travelling Circus , The Circus Dwarf (1912), The Double Jockey Act (1916), A Daughter of the Circus (1923) and The Laugh and Alone, both dating from 1944. One of the key paintings in Yeats’s oeuvre, This Grand Conversation was Under the Rose , dates from 1943 and depicts a melancholy clown and rider. Peter Murray, March 2019