118
74
Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
A Dusty Rose (1936)
Oil on panel, 23 x 35.5cm (9 x 14”)
Signed
Provenance: Bought by R. Brereton Barry S.C. at the Academy exhibition and sold by him through Leo Smith (Dawson Gallery),
05/02/1944 for £55, to J.P. Reihill Snr; Deepwell, Blackrock, Co. Dublin
Exhibited: -RHA Annual Exhibition, Dublin, 1940, Cat. No. 134
-Jack B. Yeats National Loan Exhibition, NCAD, Dublin, June-July 1945, Cat. No. 105
-Irish Art from Private Collections 1870-1930, Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford 1977
-Images of Yeats Exhibition, Centre de Congres, Monte Carlo, June 1990; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, July
1990, Cat. No. 21
Literature: -Jack B. Yeats, Brian Kennedy, Dublin 1992
-Jack B. Yeats: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Hilary Pyle, 1992, Vol. I, Cat. No. 485, p.440; further
illustrated Vol. III p.294
-Jack B. Yeats, Bruce Arnold, 1998, p.278-280, illustrated p.279
This is one of four paintings of roses made by Jack Yeats during the mid 1930s.The flower had a special significance for him.
He apparently always worn a rose in his buttonhole at the opening of his exhibitions and it was said that he kept a rose pinned
to his easel when he painted. Visitors noted that there was often a rose in a vase in his studio. The flower symbolised nature
and mortality but at times Yeats uses it to suggest other more complex ideas such as in
That Grand Conversation was Under the
Rose
, (National Gallery of Ireland, 1941) where it denotes the idea of secrecy or intimacy, that is the freedom to speak sub rosa.
A Dusty Rose is mentioned in a letter to Thomas Bodkin, the former director of the National Gallery of Ireland, in August
1936, when Yeats tells him that ‘I painted the other day a subject new for me – a rose. I painted the rose alive, and then followed
it into the ante room for the roses’ shadowland, and painted another little panel of it departing. But there’s nothing piano about
it, nor yet fussy diegame’. Samuel Beckett saw the painting when he visited Yeats’s studio a few weeks later, and he described
the work in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy, the art critic and close friend of Yeats. He considered it to be ‘less of a flower than
an interior’.
1
The dark wilting rose stands in a glass jug on a table in the centre of the rather congested space of a drawing room.The sinuous
form of the flower and its curving stem is contrasted by the geometric shapes of the interior such as the rectangles of the pictures
on the wall, the window panes and the furniture.The touches of bright blue on the petals are echoed throughout the composi-
tion – on the chimneypiece, the edges of the table and on the arm of the chair.They evoke the effect of strong sunlight coming
in from the window into the cooler interior. The blue contrasts with the dominant reddish greys and the deep red browns of the
room. As Beckett noted, the work is really a sophisticated study of interior space in which the neglected flower acts as a poetic
symbol of the world of nature and beauty beyond the confines of the room. It also suggests the informality of the home where
flowers are left to become dusty and to decay, and even perhaps as silent witnesses to conversations
sub rosa
.
1
Bruce Arnold, Jack Yeats, Yale University Press, pp.278-80.
Dr. Roisin Kennedy
Dublin 2014
€50,000 - 70,000
