Details
JACK BUTLER YEATS (1871-1957)
Coming up Sligo River, Early Morning
signed 'JACK B YEATS' (lower right)
oil on panel
9 x 14 in. (23 x 35.5 cm.)
Painted in 1925
Provenance
Acquired at the 1925 exhibition by Walter Richard Sickert, and bequeathed to his wife Thérèse Lessore.
Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin.
Acquired from the above by Edmund Arnold circa 1945, and by descent.
Literature
H. Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London, 1992, p. 256, no. 282.
Exhibited
London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Paintings of Irish Life, March - April 1925, no. 14.
Dublin, National College of Art, National Loan Exhibition, June - July 1945, no. 53.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.
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Lot Essay

‘A picture which is true is the memory of a moment which once was as it appears to the artist’ (J.B. Yeats, quoted in H. Pyle, ‘Jack B Yeats: “A Complete Individualist”’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook 1993, Vol. 9, Dublin, 1993, pp. 86-101).

Suffused by the delicate light and extreme stillness of dawn, Coming up Sligo River, Early Morning illustrates the important shift which occurred in Jack B. Yeats’s painterly style during the mid-1920s. Capturing the view from the deck of a small boat as it glides up river, the composition is executed with long, sweeping strokes of pigment which reveal the freer, more fluid application of paint that characterised the artist’s works of this period. Eschewing the strictly delineated contours of his early paintings, the figures and the landscape are defined by Yeats’s lyrical brushwork alone, built using layers of luminous colour that trace the nuances of the early morning light within the scene. Shortly after its completion, Coming up Sligo River, Early Morning was included in the London exhibition Paintings of Irish Life, where it was purchased by the artist Walter Sickert. An enthusiastic supporter of Yeats’s work, the pair enjoyed a close friendship from the mid-1920s onwards. In a letter written in 1924, just a year prior to acquiring the present composition, Sickert had praised Yeats work, proclaiming that ‘[it] fulfils my theory that there can be modern painting—Life above everything’ (Sickert, letter to J. B. Yeats, undated (ca. January 1924), Yeats Archive, National Gallery of Ireland, quoted in N. O’Donnell, ‘“Irrigated Neither by the Seine Nor by the Thames”: Jack B. Yeats’s Reception in London’, British Art Studies, Issue 14, Nov 2019).

Post Lot Text
Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot. You must pay us an extra amount equal to the resale royalty and we will pay the royalty to the appropriate authority. Please see the Conditions of Sale for further information.

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