PORTRAIT BY AUGUSTUS JOHN (1878-1961), proof unpublished etching with dry point, three-quarter length, half turned to the right, signed in pencil by John in the lower margin, size of plate 7 x 5 inches, framed and glazed, overall size 15½ x 13½ inches, 1907

A fine, unpublished and rare proof impression of one of the most celebrated portraits of the 'poet of the twilight'.

In 1907 Yeats commissioned Augustus John to produce a portrait for the forthcoming edition of his Collected Works. The sittings took place at Coole Park, the home of Yeats's patron, Lady Gregory (translator [surely with Yeats] of the traditional lament 'Donal Og'), whose son Robert had recommended John for the portrait.

Despite his admiration for John, who did a number of studies preparatory to the etching, Yeats's reaction to the final portrait was mixed, but he was canny enough to comment 'remember that all artistic work is received with an outcry, with hatred even. Suspect all work that is not.'

Yeats told John Quinn that 'Augustus John, who made a very fine thing of me, has made me a sheer tinker, drunken, unpleasant and disreputable, but full of wisdom - a melancholy English Bohemian, capable of everything except living joyously on the surface...I felt rather a martyr going to him...He exaggerates every little hill and hollow of the face till one looks like a gypsy, grown old in wickedness and hardship. If one looks like any of his pictures the country women would take the clean clothes off the hedges when one passed, as they do at the sight of a tinker...' His immediate conclusion was that it is 'a wonderful etching; but fanciful as portrait.'

John rejoined that Yeats 'has a natural and sentimental prejudice in favour of the W.B. Yeats he and other people have been accustomed to see and imagine for so many years. He is now 44 and a robust and virile and humorous personality (while still the poet of course). I cannot see in him any definite resemblance to the youthful Shelley in a lace collar. To my mind he is far more interesting as he is, as maturity is more interesting than immaturity. But my unprejudiced vision must seem brutal and unsympathetic to those in whom direct vision is supplanted by a vague and sentimental memory...With his lank forelock falling over his brow, his myopic eyes, his hieratic gestures, he looked every inch a poet of the twilight.'

Later Yeats conceded that he began 'to feel John had found something that he liked in me, something closer than character, and by that very transformation made it visible. He found Anglo-Irish solitude, a solitude I have made for myself, an outlawed solitude.'

REFERENCES: Campbell Douglas, A Catalogue of Etchings by Augustus John, 1920, no. 26 (not seen); Michael Holroyd, Augustus John: the Years of Innocence, 1947; The Letters of W.B. Yeats, edited by John Kelley, 1986-1994; The Letters by W.B. Yeats, edited by Allan Yates, 1954; Augustus John, Autobiography, edited by Michael Holroyd.