Adam's Important Irish Art September 26th 2018

44 35 JACK BUTLER YEATS RHA (1871-1957) The Sandwich Board Man Pen, ink and watercolour on paper, 21 x 32cm (8¼ x 12½’’) Signed Provenance: A gift from the artist to his private nurse and thence by decent. In Yeats’s drawing an old man carries a sandwich board across his shoulders. It bears a placard advertising a cinema. The man pauses to fill his pipe with tobacco. He stands near the Dublin quays, on D’Olier Street, just south of O’Con- nell Bridge. The O’Connell Monument and Nelson’s Column are visible behind his right shoulder. This was a favourite part of the city for Yeats. A number of his oil paintings such as Crossing the City , (1929, Private Collection), and The Street in Shadow (1925, Private Collection) focus on this central location. The more famous Bachelor’s Walk, In Memory (1915, on loan to National Gallery of Ireland) and The Liffey Swim (1923, National Gallery of Ireland) both depict sites just the other side of the quays to this view. A well-dressed man and woman, gazing into a shop window, stand close behind the figure. Across the street the end of a tram can be seen with a man standing on its platform. Beyond this pedestrians hurry along the pavement. Amidst this scene of a busy crowd, the sandwich-board man appears both aloof and solitary. He is a type of outsider figure that was much admired by Yeats and central in his work. The artist was fascinated by the nomadic existence of such figures, whose livelihood was uncertain and arduous. While outsiders were usually ballad singers or travelling nomads in the landscape, the sandwich-board man offers an urban alternative. He calls to mind the drifting carriers of the H.E.L.Y.S. sign in James Joyce’s Ulysses whom Bloom encounters at several points on his crossings of Dublin. Yeats was keenly aware of the world of advertising, noting down unusual or witty by-lines, slogans and signage in his sketch- books. He had worked briefly for the famous billboard company, David Allen and Sons, in Manchester in 1892. Hilary Pyle notes that when sandwich boards were used to advertise Yeats’s exhibitions in Dublin in the early 1900s, the artist coloured the placards himself. The image is constructed in black ink with touches of pale colour applied afterwards. The cross hatchings evoke the lines of woodblock prints or engravings and impart a primitive quality, suggesting the authenticity and simplicity of the scene. The finer and looser use of black line used in the left hand side of the composition suggests falling rain or fading light. The surface of the road is made to appear damp through the use of a cold blue colour and widely spaced strong vertical lines juxtaposed by looser thinner lines. The complex use of line in the face of the sandwich-board man conveys his character sympathetically, an elderly man engaged in filling his pipe and temporarily removed in a psycho- logical sense from his surroundings. Róisín Kennedy, August 2018 € 20,000 - 30,000