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Anne Yeats , Irish, 1919-2001

Title

Women and Washing, Sicily

Date1965

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions

61 x 91.3 cm

Signedlower left: ANNE YEATS

Credit LinePresented, Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, for the Yeats Museum, 1995

Object numberNGI.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, 1994Exhibition 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
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.