Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
The Captain (1948)
Oil on board, 23 x 35.5cm (9 x 14”)
Signed; inscribed with title verso

Provenance: The artist’s family, their sale, Sotheby’s London 27/09/2017, lot...

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
The Captain (1948)
Oil on board, 23 x 35.5cm (9 x 14”)
Signed; inscribed with title verso

Provenance: The artist’s family, their sale, Sotheby’s London 27/09/2017, lot 191, where purchased, Private Collection.

Exhibited: Galway, Kenny Art Gallery, Paintings and Drawings, 1976, no.7

Literature: Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Vol II, Andre Deutsch, London 1992, no 893, p.810, illustrated

 

This late work belonged to the Yeats family until very recently. It has rarely been exhibited in public. It depicts a youthful sailor standing looking over the side of his boat. This figure dominates the composition. The viewpoint is from below as if the viewer were standing on a quayside looking up. The sailor wears a cobalt blue jacket and cap, a black cravat and has a pink rose in his buttonhole. The latter suggests a farewell token from a lover or family member. The rose had specific significance for Yeats who kept the flower fastened to his easel. Aware of its nationalist symbolism, as exemplified in the allegorical Róisín Dubh, and the idea of speaking ‘sub rosa’ or in secret, the rose recurs in several of Yeats’s paintings and illustrations. The prominence of the flower in the painting suggests subterfuge and adds to the enigmatic aura of the subject. Its placement on Yeats’s easel was to remind himself that all his work would be ‘sub rosa; I would never again discuss the meaning of my pictures’.[1] The bag which the captain holds also evokes the sense of a decisive departure and the packing of mementos. While the jaunty nature of his dress may indicate that this is a voyage of leisure rather than an arduous expedition, the captain’s pensive and even sorrowful expression looks as if he were filled with regret or anxiety for the journey ahead. But his erect stance and forward looking gaze indicate that despite his youth, he has command of his post and that he is vigilant. Conditions appear calm, suggesting that the boat is still at anchor and preparing to depart. Traces of yellow across the sky and on the figure’s face suggest that evening is falling. To the left the open sea extends with a rocky island on the horizon.

Sea captains feature in many of Yeats’s paintings, both in oils and watercolours. His childhood experience of spending time with the navigators and dockworkers on his grandfather’s shipping business in Sligo provided him with memories and stories of their lives and adventures that remained central to his imagination throughout his long career. Unlike the figures in most of these images, such as the red-bearded mariner in the 1906 watercolour, The Sea Captain or the older man of The Captain, Early Morning (1929, Private Collection), this captain is clean shaven and young and appears to be less experienced or world weary than these others. Silhouetted against the sky, the figure looks heroic but the complex construction of the painting disrupts such a simplistic reading. Thin flecks of blue pigment across the pale sky and the fragile construction of the figure’s head and torso, a mixture of impasto and sgraffito, such as where the lips and ear are outlined by lines scraped through the paint, make this a more complex and tangible work of art. The vagaries of time and memory are conveyed through the physicality of its surface and the tenuousness of its forms.

Dr. Roisin Kennedy, November 2023

 

[1] Yeats quoted in Nora A. McGuinness, The Literary Universe of Jack B. Yeats, 1992, p.45.

 

 

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