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39 JACK BUTLER YEATS RHA (1871-1957)A Man Doing Accounts (1929)
Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 61cm (18 X 24”)
Signed, signed again and inscribed with title verso, title inscribed on stretcher also.
Provenance: Purchased direct from the artist by Colonel Clive Morris, 1947. With the Redfern Gallery, London 1951 where purchased. “The Irish Sale”
Christie’s, London, 10 May 2007, lot 97 where purchased by Derek Quinlan and his sale London Nov 2011 Cat. No. 135 where purchased by
current owner.
Exhibited:
Jack B Yeats Paintings,
Alpine Club Gallery, London February 1929 Cat. No. 26;
Jack B Yeats Paintings,
Engineers Hall, Dublin October 1929 Cat. No. 9;
Irish Exhibition,
The World Fair, Chicago , 1933;
Jack B. Yeats Loan exhibition,
Temple Newsam House, Leeds 1948 Cat. No. 13 this exhibition organized by The Arts; Council of Great Britain
then travelled to The Tate Gallery in London and then on to Aberdeen Art Gallery and Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy.
Literature:
A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings,
H. Pyle,
Volume I, London, 1992, p. 362, Cat. no. 398
In a country town at night-time a man tends to his accounts in a brightly lit interior. A young woman passes by on the street outside. The heads of the two
figures, inclined in the same way, suggest a sense of connection and even intimacy. Beyond the female figure the streetscape opens to a mountainous
landscape with the tall dark silhouette of a spire marking the perimeter of the town. A horse and rider gallop along the street.
The painting centres on the juxtaposition between the bookish accountant in his luminous office and the woman who, with her hand drawn to her bosom,
rushes along outside. The intricate juxtapositions of figures and spaces are enhanced by the unorthodox use of paint. Fluid opaque strokes of purple and
blue evoke the darkened street and sky while bright red and yellow is used to sculpt the interior space. These brighter colours are subtly reflected in the
distant landscape and on the mane of the speeding horse. The most dramatic contrast is that between the faces of the man and woman. These are both
deeply expressive and are almost sculpted out of thick layers of paint. While the woman’s features are cast in purple shadow, the accountant’s face is
illuminated by the glare of artificial light and is made up of a cacophony of colour.
The work was shown at the Alpine Club Gallery in London in 1929 at an important one-man show of Yeats in which he exhibited several of his new expres-
sionist paintings.
Man Doing his Accounts
is an important example of this new tendency. Yeats regarded the show as a critical success and wrote to tell Lady
Gregory so. The painting was subsequently shown at Dublin, Chicago and then again at the Tate Gallery in London in1948. Its combination of the traditional
and the modern, the rural and the urban, and the divergence of the male and female figures make it an important example of Yeats’s ability to express the
contradictory nature of modern Ireland through the language of paint.
Dr Roisin Kennedy, September 2016
€ 200,000 - 300,000