John Butler Yeats, Irish, 1839-1922
Title: Self-Portrait
Date: c.1921
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
89 x 75 cm
Credit Line: Purchased, 1997
Object Number: NGI.4642
DescriptionFrom 1920 JBY pursued his self-portrait project obsessively, producing pencil sketches and half-length portraits in oil. In Life and the Dream (1947), Mary Colum described JBY’s lodgings at the Petitpas boarding house, with iron bed, cheap worn rug and ‘an easel on which was always erected a portrait at which he tinkered day after day.’ In this vibrant likeness, loosely painted in an impressionistic manner, the artist portrays himself as if interrupted in the moment of creation. In his endless search for perfection, JBY often abandoned or overworked his paintings.This unfinished self-portrait was found in the Petitpas premises after the proprietors had left.
Exhibition HistoryAt a Glance - Portraits by John Butler Yeats, National Gallery of Ireland, 24 October 2015 - 17 January 2016
Label TextFrom 1920 John Butler Yeats pursued his self-portrait project obsessively, producing numerous pencil sketches and half-length portraits in oil. In Life and the Dream (1947), Mary Colum described his rather basic lodgings at the Petitpas boarding house in New York, remembering the iron bed, cheap worn rug and easel ‘on which was always erected a portrait at which he tinkered day after day.’ He wrote himself of the painting: ‘It is a long revel, just as satisfying to me as Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and I think I have been at it almost as long.’
Label TextFrom 1920 JBY pursued his self-portrait project obsessively, producing pencil sketches and half-length portraits in oil. In Life and the Dream (1947), Mary Colum described JBY’s lodgings at the Petitpas boarding house, with iron bed, cheap worn rug and ‘an easel on which was always erected a portrait at which he tinkered day after day.’ In this vibrant likeness, loosely painted in an impressionistic manner, the artist portrays himself as if interrupted in the moment of creation. In his endless search for perfection, JBY often abandoned or overworked his paintings. This unfinished self-portrait was found in the Petitpas premises after the proprietors had left.