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Anne Butler Yeats (26 February 1919-4 July 2001) was an Irish painter, costume and stage designer. She was the daughter of the poet William Butler Yeats and Georgie Hyde-Lees, a niece of the painter Jack B. Yeats, and of Lily Yeats and of Elizabeth Corbet Yeats. Born in Dublin on 26 February 1919, her birth was commemorated by her father with the poem A Prayer for My Daughter. Anne Yeats spent her first 3 years between Ballylee County Galway and Oxford before her family moved to 82 Merrion Square, Dublin in 1922. She was very sick as a child. She spent three years in two different hospitals. St. Margaret's Hall, 50 Mespil Rd, and Nightingale Hall, Morehampton Rd Dublin. She then went to the Pension Henriette, a boarding school in Villars-sur-Bex, Switzerland from 1928-1930. In 1923 her Aunt Elizabeth "Lolly" gave her brush drawing lessons which aided her in winning first prize in the RDS National Art competition for children under eight years old in 1925 and 1926. She trained in the Royal Hibernian Academy school from 1933 to 1936, and worked as a stage designer with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. At the Abbey, she designed the sets and costumes for revivals of W.B. Yeats' plays The resurrection and On Baile's strand (1938). In 1938 she designed the first production of W.B. Yeats' play Purgatory. The designs for Purgatory were her most successful achievement. "My daughter's designs for [Cuchulain] and Purgatory -especially Purgatory were greatly admired" quoted by W.B Yeats. Purgatory was the last play that W.B Yeats saw on stage, and when it was performed it was a full house. Anne Yeats also designed the first play of her uncle Jack Yeats to receive professional production, Harlequin's Positions. In 1939 she was promoted to head of design at the Abbey until her departure in May 1941. In 1939 it was commented that her designs were "getting arty" and not in keeping with style of the Abbey. One of her last designs was her father's last play, The Death of Cuchulain for the Lyric Theatre on the Abbey stage, in 1949. She designed and stage-managed for The Peacock, The Cork Opera House, The Olympia, The Gaiety Theatre, the Austin Clarke Lyric Theatre, the Abbey Theatre and Player's Theatre. She chose to move towards painting full-time beginning a brief study at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1941. She experimented with watercolour and wax. She had a touching naive expressionist style and was interested in representing domestic humanity. She designed many of the covers for the books of Irish-language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill over a twenty-year period from 1958. She did illustrations for books by Denis Devlin, Thomas Kinsella and Louis MacNeice, and worked with many young designers, such as Louis LeBrocquy. The Royal Hibernian Academy held a retrospective of her work in 1995, as did the National Gallery of Ireland in 2002. She donated her collection of Jack B. Yeats' sketch books to the National Gallery of Ireland, leading to the creation of the Yeats Museum within the Gallery. Her brother, Michael, in turn, donated her sketchbooks to the Museum. This 1944 First Edition volume was the personal copy of Anne Yeats. On the front end paper she has inscribed " Anne B, Yeats, Dublin March 1945". Measuring 9x5.5 inches with colour frontis, 3 colour plates, 21 b/w plates it contains a fascinating history of French posters of the nineteenth century.The unclipped pictorial dust jacket has sustained some paper loss, bumping and tears (see photo). Unsurprisingly the grey cloth covered boards have sustained some paint.(see photo). Presumably she kept this book in her studio. The pages themselves are clean and bright other than some foxing on the end papers. Please examine all seller photos. More available upon request.
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