Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 4 DECEMBER 2024

60 This very early oil painting is based on a scene from a play ‘Willie Reilly ’ which was per- formed at the Mechanics Theatre, Lower Abbey Street, Dublin in October 1901. The mel- odrama is based on an 18th century Ulster ballad which tells the tale of a Catholic farmer who elopes with the daughter of an Orangeman. He is subsequently deported for life for transgressing the Penal Laws. Yeats’s later oil Rise up Willie Reilly (1945, Private Collection) is based on the female ballad singer whose opening verse calls on Reilly to rise up and come along with her, a nationalist interpretation of the song. In the 1902 version the character of Willie Reilly stands on stage, in front of an elaborate set depicting a waterfall, a high moun- tain and a wooded landscape. In his later work, In Memory of Boucicault and Bianconi (1937, National Gallery of Ireland), Yeats uses a similar setting for a melodrama but here it is the real landscape of the Glencar waterfall. The complex stage set of the Mechanics Theatre includes a coulisse or piece of scenery that extends out into the stage and through which the actor must have appeared. In this claustrophobic setting, the figure proclaims himself, wearing a bright green riding jacket, fine riding boots and carrying a riding crop. His right arm with clenched fist is raised in a dramatic gesture. His mouth is open in song, and, in fact, the painting was also known as The Singing Actor . This middle aged man, with his curly wig, flushed cheeks and portly build, is far from a conventional romantic hero. Yeats told the Irish American lawyer John Quinn in 1903 that he was based on ‘a decayed old actor whom I saw in a theatre down by the docks in Dublin…’. ¹ Yeats was an avid theatre goer throughout his life, writing several plays himself, including producing cut out miniature theatres for children. He reused the first verse of the ballad Wil- lie Reilly in one of the latter, The Treasure of the Garden (1903). He frequented the Mechan- ics Theatre which he referred to as the Sailor’s Theatre and in his 1905 watercolour, Willie Reilly at the Old Mechanics Theatre, (1905, Private Collection), the audience is dominated by sailors.² The Mechanics Theatre was acquired by Annie Horniman in 1904 and became the home of the new Abbey Theatre. The painting which prefigures many of Yeats’s later theatre inspired works is painted in thick vibrantly coloured oil paint. The playhouse and music hall were popular subjects with artists interested in the interaction between the performer and the public such as the English painter Walter Sickert who admired Yeats’s work. The artificial stage setting is clearly evident in the prominent floorboards and the black light boxes in the foreground and in the shadow cast over the face of Willie Reilly. The painting was bought by John Quinn on his first visit to Ireland in 1902 and was included in the sale of his outstanding collection of modern art in New York in 1927. It was acquired there by the critic and writer, Ernest Boyd, author of Contemporary Drama in Ireland (1917). Dr. Róisín Kennedy, October 2024 1. Quoted in Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings , André Deutsch, London, 1992, I, p.4. 2. Jim Cooke, ‘The Mechanics’ Institute 1824-1919’, Dublin Historical Record, 52, (1999), pp,15-31.