Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) Downpatrick Head, Co. Mayo (1909) Oil on board, 23 x 35.5cms (9 x 14) Signed Provenance: Leo Smith, November 1946, Sir Hugh Beaver; thence by descent to Mrs. C. Lawson-Tancred; Sale, Christies, 17th November 1978, lot 164 Exhibited: Dublin, Stephen's Green Gallery, Drawings and Paintings of Life in the West of Ireland, February-March 1921, no.13 Literature: Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats; A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings I, London, 1992, no.11, p.12 (illustrated p.6) Hilary Pyle has described the view (pp.11-12), Downpatrick Head, five miles north-east of Ballycastle, lies on the right horizon, with the spectacular Doonbristy - the cliff with promontory fort cut off at the end of the Head - in the centre Yeats visited Downpatrick Head, near Ballycastle in north Co. Mayo in 1909 and painted two oils and several watercolours of the scenery. His sketchbooks also contain drawings of this distinctive coastline. The other oil painting which he produced shows a slightly different view of the same vista and is now in the collection of Limerick City Art Gallery. Pure landscapes, without figures, are a feature of Yeats's early ventures into oil paint which he had only begun to use in 1902. This view of the waves crashing onto the rocky shoreline with a turbulent sky above is reminiscent of some of the more dramatic of Nathaniel Hone's coastal landscapes and reveals Yeats to be a consummate painter of nature. Equally the use of strong colour and form show his awareness of modern approaches to landscape in which coastal views had an established pedigree going back to the work of Claude Monet and the impressionists. The cut-off composition focuses attention on the rocks in the foreground. Their variegated texture is conveyed through thickly applied paint inflexed with blues, greys and browns. The shoreline provides the composition with a strong undulating component extending across the lower left hand side of the painting. This is subtly echoed in the view of the dramatic sea stack of Doonbristy in the distance to the right where the headland extends into the ocean. The horizon line brings an element of calm and stability to the composition and acts as a counterpart to the irregularity of the rocks in the foreground. Immediately above it the sky appears as an expanse of white opaque cloud while the ocean directly before it seems almost static. This conveys a sense of distance and expanse and intensifies the physicality of the more forceful elements of the shore and the upper sky. Dr. Roisin Kennedy