The Art of Jack B. Yeats

Description

Dublin, Ireland: Victor Waddington Publications Limited, 1945. First Edition. Hardcover. Near Fine / Very Good Plus. 12mo, 5 x 7.6 in., p. 39 + 58 (Twenty-nine black and white plates of Jack B. Yeats’ paintings). Planned, printed and bound in Ireland by Colin O Lochlainn at the Sign of the Three Candles, Dublin. Beige paper boards with maroon title and decorative monogam (“JBW”) to cover. Designer gray endpapers. Publisher’s red topstain. Very light rubbing to extremities; very light spotting to fore-edge and tail. Light fading to price-clipped dustjacket with gentle rubbing and age-toning to top edge.
Dustjacket is price clipped. Protected in mylar.

Original hand-drawn picture in blue ink of sailboat, horse, and ducks signed by Jack. B. Yeats to title page. Yeats was one of the foremost Irish painters of the 20th Century, and brother of poet W.B. Yeats. Presentation copy signed by author with inscription: “Richard Hayward’s book” to publisher’s page. Richard Hayward (1892-1964) was an Irish poet, novelist, playwright, historian, film actor, specialist in Ulster dialect, and ballad singer; he produced over 100 records. Included: A mid-1940s postcard found in book when acquired, printed by The National Library of Ireland of a black and white drawing of W.B. Yeats by Jack B. Yeats entitled “(W.B. Yeats when a Boy)”. The handwritten ink message on the postcard reads: “Very Best Wishes to you all for Christmas and the New Year – William M. Glynn, Newtown School”. William M. Glynn was the principal of The Newtown School, a Quaker school founded in 1798, which in the 1930s founded The Waterford Gallery, promoting Irish artists, including Jack B. Yeats, as world-renowned contributors. “From around 1920, he developed into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism. He was sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause, but not politically active. However, he believed that ‘a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints’, and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helped articulate a modern Dublin of the 20th century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man. Samuel Beckett wrote that “Yeats is with the great of our time… because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence.”The Marxist art critic and author John Berger also paid tribute to Yeats from a very different perspective, praising the artist as a “great painter” with a “sense of the future, an awareness of the possibility of a world other than the one we know”…In 1943 he accepted Victor Waddington as his sole dealer and business manager. Waddington played a crucial role in his career and reputation.