Jack B. Yeats
, Irish, 1871-1957
Title
Many FerriesDate1948
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions
51 x 69 cm
Signedlower right: Jack B. Yeats
Credit LineBequeathed, Mrs J. Egan, through the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, 1960
Object numberNGI.1550
ProvenancePurchased, Mrs Julie Egan, 1951; bequeathed, Mrs J. Egan, through the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, 1960Exhibition HistoryUnited Nations International Art Exhibition, Edinburgh, 1951Friends of the National Collections of Ireland Exhibition, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin; Ulster Museum, Belfast, 1964
Modern Irish Painting (An Chomhirle Ealaion), Helsinki; Göteborg; Norrköpping; Stockholm; Copenhagen; Bielefeld; Bonn; Saarbrücken; London; Leeds; Glasgow; Dublin, 1969-1971
Jack B. Yeats 1871-1957: A Centenary Exhibition, Dublin; New York, 1971-1972
Jack B. Yeats in the National Gallery of Ireland, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 1986
Label TextMany Ferries recalls a visit Yeats made in 1905, with the playwright John Millington Synge, to Dinish Island, one of a group of islands off the coast of Connemara known collectively as Ceantar na nOileán. A ferryman took the two travellers up to the highest point of the island to show them the view. Synge wrote about the expedition in a series of essays published in 1911. In Yeats’s painting, he depicts the remembered ferryman in a broad-brimmed hat looking down at the string of islands.