Jack B. Yeats
, Irish, 1871-1957
Title
DraughtsDate1922
MediumOil on board
Dimensions
23 x 36 cm
Signedlower left: Jack B. Yeats
Credit LineBequeathed, Mr R. Best, 1959
Object numberNGI.1407
ProvenanceSold at exhibition, Richard Irvine Best, 1922; bequeathed, Mr R. Best, 1959
Exhibition HistoryDrawings and Pictures of Life in the West of Ireland, Stephen's Green Gallery, Dublin, 24 April - 8 May 1922
National Loan Exhibition, National College of Art, June - July 1945
Jack B. Yeats in the National Gallery of Ireland, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 26 March - 20 April 1986
Yeats at the Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, 1988
Label TextAmong the areas of Dublin in which Yeats sketched extensively was the Grand Canal Docks in Ringsend. His interest in urban characters coincided with a growing awareness of the importance of memory. Figures like these dockers, probably drawn from memory but based on direct observation, thus took the place in his Dublin pictures that Sligo sailors had occupied in earlier paintings. Yeats’s evolving notion of ‘half-memory’ informed these pictures, and anticipated the artist’s mature, fantastical works. A prevailing stillness and muted colour range lend the painting a distinctly contemplative quality.