Jack B. Yeats R.H.A.

(Irish, 1871-1957)

The Lark Sings High 22.8 x 35.5 cm. (9 x 14 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Sydney Moore Esq.
Acquired by the father of the present owner in the 1980s
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
Belfast, New Gallery, Jack B. Yeats Loan Exhibition, 14 June-26 June 1965, cat.no.4

Literature
Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Volume II, André Deutsch Ltd., London, 1992, p.892, cat.no.988

Yeats once told the art historian Sir John Rothenstein that "the painter always begins by expressing himself with line – that is, by the most obvious means; then he becomes aware that line...is in fact hemming him in, and as soon as he feels strong enough, he breaks out of its confines". Perhaps nothing else said by or of the artist could chart more revealingly and efficiently the development of his career than this statement; the present work provides an excellent, wonderfully lyrical example of the culmination of this process.

Having begun his career working almost exclusively in line-based prints, making his first impressions on a wider audience through broadsheet illustration, Yeats did not complete his first oil painting until he was 26. By 1949, when The Lark Sings High was painted, he had very much broken out of the confines of line, and of structured, objective form. The central figure here is anything but linear, a form in motion as it further emerges the longer you look from the rich concoction of colours that tantalisingly suggest a scene. The musical nature of the subject is reflected in the painterly approach, the sound carrying on Yeats' fluid, instinctive brushwork, pursed lips caught mid movement as they animate the metaphorical 'lark' – the instrument implied by the swirling fingers raised in action.

It has been suggested that his highly distinctive style of dynamic, sensuous expressionism is in part the result of his lack of formal artistic education. While indebted to the developments of Post-Impressionism and Modernism in regards to a sheer freedom of imagination – he once declared in a letter to his great friend and sponsor John Quinn that "the great good the Post-Impressionists and Futurists will do will be...[to] knock the handcuffs off all painters" – Yeats very much went in his own direction once the handcuffs were off, self-propelled and deeply rooted in his surroundings. His assertion that the artist should be "a part of the land and the life he paints" reinforces his decision in 1910 to move permanently back to a small town south of Dublin, illustrating the greater inspiration he would take from the people, the urban buzz and the rural quiet of his native Ireland than he would from parallel developments in contemporary art. Indeed, he took virtually no part in artistic circles, and was rarely seen at exhibitions.

Undeterred by this elusive nature, Yeats' stature as a painter grew ever stronger among those same circles in which he involved himself little. By the 1940s, Sir Kenneth Clark initiated his election to the London Group and invited him to show at the major war-time exhibition British Painting Since Whistler (1940). A shared exhibition with William Nicholson in 1942 at the National Gallery, where Clark was director, was an enormous success, and by this stage his works were selling instantly. The present work comes at the apex of the artist's career, where his work was infused with a deep understanding of and security in his artistic vision, and with recognition finally catching up with the unique, remarkably expressive world he was creating.

We are grateful to Dr. Róisín Kennedy for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.