Coming up Sligo River, Early Morning

‘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).

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