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JACK BUTLER YEATS RHA (1871 - 1957)
The Creole (1946)
Oil on board, 23 x 35.5cm (9 x 14”)
Signed
Provenance: Sold by the artist to Reeves Levanthal, USA, 1946; Joseph B. Gallagher, New York
Literature: “Jack B. Yeats - A Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings”, by Hilary Pyle, No. 787, p.709
The exotic title
The Creole
refers to the ship at anchor depicted at the centre of the painting. There were
two famous ships called
The Creole
that Yeats would have known about. One was the ship on which the
famous slave mutiny took place off the Bahamas in 1841, known as the Creole Mutiny. The other was a
ship that was chartered to take people from Roscommon to New York via Liverpool in October 1847, at
the height of the Great Famine. Yeats would have been particularly conscious of the latter connection
as he painted this work almost exactly one hundred years later. Yeats was constantly revisiting his own
history and that of the West of Ireland in his paintings of the 1940s. Ships and sea-journeys feature in
several of these works.
Yeats was undoubtedly attracted to the subject by the name Creole. He was fascinated by words
and language and used them to create poetic and evocative titles for his paintings. Creole refers to a
descendant of a foreign race who has settled in an alien land or to a language which is a mixture of two
or more parent languages. The word and the idea of the creole have obvious relevance to an Irish artist
working in the middle of the twentieth century. It is an appropriate title for a work that relates to the
experience of migration.
The specific details of the ship and its journey are not referred to in the painting. Its complex compo-
sition centres on a vessel that is overwhelmed by the surrounding sea and land and by the massive
walls of a harbour mouth or precipitous canal walls. The steep cliffs of the nearby coastline topped by
green banks and dominated by an array of buildings command the horizon. The view is framed by two
vertical blocks of deep blue which act like the coulisses of stage scenery to dramatically curtail the vista.
A large bright yellow element in the right hand foreground adds to the theatricality of the scene and
seems to confine the rest of the composition to the realm of history or of the imagination.
The strident blend of blues, greens and reds create an intense array of colour that heightens the
strangeness of the image. Yeats experimented with using contrasting hues in this manner in his work of
the 1930s when he discussed colour theory with the Professor of Physics in UCD, Felix Hackett. In such
works as
About to Write a Letter,
(1936, National Gallery of Ireland) Yeats juxtaposed a strong red with
acidic greens. In The Creole he uses a similar blend of clashing colours that suggest the turmoil of the
sea journey at both a physical and psychological level.
Dr. Róisín Kennedy November 2015
€ 30,000 - 50,000