Beschreibung:

Artist: Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) Title: Romantic Shades (c.1911) Signature: signed and titled lower right Medium: watercolour and Indian ink on paper (3) Size: 40½ x 58½cm (15.9 x 23in) Framed Size: 62.5 x 79cm (24.6 x 31.1in) Provenance: Collection of Mr & Mrs Frank Hughes; Victor Waddington Gallery, London (label verso); Sotheby's, London, 10th May 2012 lot 131; James Adams, Dublin, 7th December 2016 lot 49 where purchased by the present owner Exhibited: 1973 London Waddington III (30-1: 30 is repro) Literature: Reproduced: A Broadside no.12 third year (May 2011); Jack B.Yeats, The Different Worlds of Jack B.Yeats - His Cartoons and illustrations by Hilary Pyle no.1848 page 255 a#morebtn { color: #de1d01; } a#morebtn:hover { cursor: pointer;} [along with two accompanying preparatory drawings by Yeats, in pencil, with annotations] Beginning in 1908, Jack's sisters managed the printing and publishing of A Broadside, with Jack illustrating and editing the first series, while his brother W.B. edited the second and third series. A Broadsid... Read more Jack Butler Yeats Lot 35 - 'Romantic Shades (c.1911)' Estimate: €8,000 - €12,000 [along with two accompanying preparatory drawings by Yeats, in pencil, with annotations] Beginning in 1908, Jack's sisters managed the printing and publishing of A Broadside, with Jack illustrating and editing the first series, while his brother W.B. edited the second and third series. A Broadside ceased publication in 1915. Reproduced in the May 1911 issue, "Romantic Shades" is one of Yeats's most complex ink drawings. Occupying centre stage in this pantheon of heroes and villains from the world of literature stands the diminutive figure of a Chinese conjurer, who, reaching into an upturned hat, extracts an endless stream of lotus flowers which he strews in a circle on the ground. Gathered around the conjurer are a motley crew, including Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer,, Huckleberry Finn, Hamlet and Falstaff. Scattered among the crowd are dark-eyed pirates and rogues, including Blackbeard and Yeat's own Theodore, as well as the traitor Harvey Duff from Dion Boucicault's melodrama The Shaughraun. One character is named 'Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye', while up in a tree are the hapless Don Quixote and Sancha Panza. Other luminaries in Yeat's pantheon include Sinbad the Sailor, Willie Reilly (hero of a novel by Carleton) and Champagne Charlie. The concept of such a drawing, depicting the heroes and villains who inhabited Jack Yeats's imagination and inspired both his art works and writings, derives from a tradition in eighteenth-century European art, where an imagined pantheon of writers, politicians, philosophers are assembled by the artist into one group portrait, as in James Barry's mural painting in the Society of Arts in London. Yeats has taken this genre and re-invented it, creating a stage crowded with characters from the imagination, rather than real life. Peter Murray, September 2021