Jack Butler Yeats – Evening Trees, Coole Lake

Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957), younger brother of Romantic poet William Butler Yeats, is an Irish painter known for his vibrant expressionist works capturing Irish life, landscapes, and folklore.

Born in London, England and raised mostly in Sligo, Ireland, Yeats studied art in London before returning to Ireland in 1910 to focus on painting. His early work depicted everyday rural and urban scenes with naturalistic detail, reflecting the true Ireland rather than his brother’s poetic vision.

One of his most famous paintings, Bachelor’s Walk, In Memory, 1915, illustrates his empathetic approach, showing a tender moment after a tragic shooting during political unrest, capturing the emotional response rather than the violence itself.

In the 1920s, Jack’s style shifted dramatically to a lighter palette and freer brushwork, exploring modern scenes like circuses and horse races, alongside mystical Irish landscapes. His 1924 painting The Liffey Swim marked a peak in this evolution: “The painting marked Yeats’s growing interest in Expressionism and his adoption of fluid brushwork and a charged palette.”[1]

By the 1930s, his paintings became deeply personal and emotional: “Contemplative figures haunt his oeuvre. In the later paintings, they appear as ghostly accretions of the stuff of their surroundings, concentrations of matter, as if organically congruent with oceans and clouds. Yeats’s figures often seem to be made of the same fabric as their surroundings. The very same brush, laden still with the blue of a river, creates the coat of the wanderer in On through the Silent Lands (1951), and the whole figure in The Explorer Rebuffed (1953) seems a distillation of sea and sky.”[2]

Yeats’ later works are known for their explosive blues and indigos, capturing the unique Irish light. Samuel Beckett praised him in 1945, saying the artist “brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence.”

Evening Trees, Coole Lake, held in a private collection for decades, is unrecorded in the Yeats Archives. This oil on robust wood panel is a compelling example of later works created by the artist, likely painted between 1945-1952, in which an explosion of deep and soft blue colours emerge over an orange flurry in the lower left. Rather than a landscape, the artist invites us into his state of mind: heavy, intense, deep, leaving an image engraved in your mind. “The figures in these paintings inhabit mindscapes rather than landscapes, and these mindscapes in some way inhabit them. It has been said that Yeats created a style not only based on memory, but which shows how memory presents itself, how it feels.”[3]

Jack Butler Yeats’ first major, posthumous exhibition in 1971 at the National Gallery of Ireland, Jack B Yeats: Painting and Memory, revived recognition of Yeats as one of Ireland’s greatest modern painters, and his popularity has continued to grow with collectors making Yeats one of the most sought after Irish painters on the current market.

We are delighted to offer this important work as lot 25 in our June Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art auction.

Auction Information

This auction offers outstanding works by Canadian and international artists including Jack Yeats, Édouard Cortès, Randolph Hewton, John Little, and Jean Carzou. Additional highlights by Marie Laurencin, Peter Clapham Sheppard, Wolf Kahn, Louis de Niverville, Kim Dorland, Lindee Climo, Barker Fairley, and Théo Tobiasse complement this diverse presentation.

Public previews

Sunday, June 22 from 12 pm to 4 pm
Monday, June 23 from 10 am to 5 pm
Tuesday, June 24 from 10 am to 5 pm

Or by appointment.

Contact us to find out more.

[1] https://www.nationalgallery.ie/art-and-artists/highlights-collection/liffey-swim-jack-b-yeats-1871-1957
[2] Adam Wattman, From nowhere: Jack B. Yeats, 2023 in; https://artuk.org/discover/stories/from-nowhere-jack-b-yeats
[3] id.