Jack Yeats - Hardcover

Arnold, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300075499 ISBN 13: 9780300075496

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Jack Yeats (1871-1957) stands as a giant figure in Irish twentieth-century art. An isolated artist throughout his life, Yeats dominated solely through the talent, magic, and inventiveness of his painting. His vision and his standing, as well as many critical judgments during the forty years since his death, have provoked controversies which Bruce Arnold confronts in this major biography. The author tells the full story of the artist’s life and analyzes his prodigious output. This included not only some one thousand oil paintings and vast numbers of illustrations, comic cartoons, drawings, and watercolors but also seven novels and nine plays. An innately original man, Yeats eschewed all movements, took no pupils, taught only by example. Yet he exerted a fundamental and fascinating influence on Irish culture during his long and diverse life.

Based on extensive research in primary sources, this generously illustrated book describes the life of Jack Yeats, son of the portrait painter John Butler Yeats and younger brother of the poet William Butler Yeats. Born in London, Jack spent his formative years in his grandparents’ home in Ireland. His first show was held in England, but the young artist was inexorably drawn to Ireland where he created in drawings and paintings an Irish spirit and language that increasingly captured and glorified the heroism, mystery, myths, and legends of the Irish people. This book explores Yeats’s friendships with John Masefield, John Millington Synge, Samuel Beckett, and others; his self-identification with his chosen country; and his struggle against indifference and mockery. It provides a compelling portrait of the complex and enigmatic artist whose reputation and artistic vision have become increasingly admired in the years since his death.

About this title

About the Author:

Bruce Arnold is literary editor of the Irish Independent. He is the author of Mainie Jellett and the Modern Movement in Ireland, published by Yale University Press, and of Orpen: Mirror to an Age, both biographies of outstanding contemporaries of Jack Yeats.

Review:

...his evident affection and respect for Jack Yeats the man shine through even as he must admit the mixed quality of the work. -- The New York Times Book Review, Terence Brown

The Yeats family as a whole--the poet, the painter, and their two energetic sisters--was influential in all aspects of the Irish renascence of the early twentieth century, a fact that gives Mr. Arnold a wonderful, and wonderfully quotable, cast of characters for this splendid, well-illustrated biography. -- The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe Lou Adams

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0300075499
• ISBN 13: 9780300075496
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 428