Anne Yeats, Irish, 1919-2001
Title: Women and Washing, Sicily
Date: 1965
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
61 x 91.3 cm
Signed: lower left: ANNE YEATS
Credit Line: Presented, Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, for the Yeats Museum, 1995
Object Number: NGI.4613
ProvenanceMrs George Yeats; bequeathed, Anne Yeats; Private Collection, London; Jim O'Connor; Gorry Gallery, Dublin; presented, Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, for the Yeats Museum, 1994
Exhibition HistoryAnne Yeats: Paintings, Dawson Gallery, Dublin, 1966
Jack B. Yeats and his Family, County Museum, Sligo; Municipal Gallery, Dublin, 1971-1972
An Exhibition of 18th, 19th and 20th century Irish Paintings, Gorry Gallery, Dublin, 1995
Shades of Grey: Painting without Colour, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 22 June - 29 September 2013
Jack B. Yeats and his Family, County Museum, Sligo; Municipal Gallery, Dublin, 1971-1972
An Exhibition of 18th, 19th and 20th century Irish Paintings, Gorry Gallery, Dublin, 1995
Shades of Grey: Painting without Colour, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 22 June - 29 September 2013
Label TextAnne Yeats worked as a theatre designer until the 1940s when she began to paint seriously. She identified with Picasso, Matisse and Braque. Much of her work focuses on loneliness and solitary individuals. Even when depicting groups of people, she draws attention to the intangible distance between them. The Sicilian women are separated, both by physical space and by their stillness and apparent silence. Yeats visited Sicily in 1965 and said it was, for her, ‘an explosion of excitement’. She sketched and kept a detailed diary which inspired a series of paintings including this work.