Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1 MARCH 2023

44 29 JACK BUTLER YEATS RHA (1871-1957) The Ring Master and the Clown (1909) Watercolour, 25 x 35cm (10 x 13 ”) Signed Provenance: Peter Katz; sold to Victor Waddington, London 1967; With Victor Waddington Galleries, London, label verso Allen Figgis (owner); Waddington Galleries Montreal label verso; Sale, these rooms, 14 July,1983; Private Collection, Dublin. Exhibited: Dublin 1909, Aonach, Exhibition of Paintings, Cat. No.21 Literature: Yeats, Jack B., Life in the West of Ireland (1912,1915) 75; Yeats, Jack B., And to You Also (1944,1974) 120; Pyle, Hilary, Jack B. Yeats His Watercolours, Drawings and Pastels , Cat. No.681, p. 161,illus. € 15,000 - 20,000 By the time The Ringmaster and the Clown was first ex- hibited in 1909, Jack Yeats had already achieved a sig- nificant degree of fame and appreciation. Hugh Lane, a few years earlier, in his quest to establish a gallery of modern art in Dublin had approached artists and friends in an effort to persuade them to present works to form a nucleus of a collection. Jack Yeats, while still living in Devon presented three watercolours, The Rogue , The Melodeon Player and The Day of the Sports . By January 1908, The Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art had opened at 17 Harcourt Street. According to Hilary Pyle, Jack Yeats had given what he considered his most up- to-date important work – character studies of contem- porary Irishmen of the West. Pyle continues … ‘From about 1906, when Yeats was painting a little more in oil, a new spirit is noticeable in his watercolours. The images and manner are much the same as before, but they are treated more seriously, of- ten isolated pictorially in space; and the themes gener- ate a greater breadth of purpose. Synge’s friendship has made the artist see his Western Irish imagery in a wid- er context, so that landscapes and figures plumb more deeply from the particular to the universal’. Yeats writing in And to You Also in 1944, described ‘the parasol of the auditorium’ of the circus tent. ‘The sad- faced clown stumbles along on the ring-master’s left, while up above the ring-master on his right, sits the beautiful girl … on the back of a grand old cream horse … ’. The circus life theme stayed with Yeats throughout his career, the images from his childhood life in Sligo in- delibly etched on his pictorial memory, notably in The Haute École Act and That Grand Conversation was under the Rose , the oils of 1925 and 1943. In the present work the clown is, as Hilary Pyle describes ‘…. in merry mood, looking coyly at the spectator’.