19
Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957)
Estimate:
€6,000 - €8,000
Sold
€9,500
Live Auction
Irish & International Art
Size
30.50 by 18.50in. (77.5 by 47cm)
Description
Title: ST. ALPHONSUS, 1903
Note: This watercolour was intended as a design for an embroidered sodality banner for Loughrea Cathedral, Co. Galway. It was executed in 1903 as part of a commission awarded to the fledgling Dun Emer Guild, which was founded in 1902 by Evelyn Gleeson. Her two principal partners in the venture were Jack Yeats’ sisters, Susan and Elizabeth (or Lily and Lolly as they were known to family and friends). When the Guild received this prestigious commission, they invited Jack and his wife Mary (known as Cottie) to supply designs for the banners. Jack designed the Sacred Heart banner and the banners for all the male saints bar two (these were designed by George Russell (Æ)), whilst Cottie supplied designs for nearly all of the female saints. In all, twenty-nine banners were completed, with a further four designs including the present work of St Alphonsus being executed but ultimately not used. In the present work Yeats depicts St Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787), Founder of the Redemptionist Fathers. In common with other Loughrea designs, the figure is drawn in heavy black outline, with a richly coloured cassock and his cloak decorated in what Paul Larmour has described as “an almost cloisonné-like manner” of Celtic ornamentation. (‘The Dun Emer Guild’, Irish Arts Review, Vol. 1 No. 4, Winter 1984, p.25). At the time of the commission, The Irish Homestead described the banners as displaying “freshness and quaint naturalness”, combined with “sympathy and native feeling” and hailed them as the start “of a new epoch in art work of this kind, wherein originality of design shall replace vulgarity and simple beauty replace tawdriness” (13 February 1904, p. 134).
Note: This watercolour was intended as a design for an embroidered sodality banner for Loughrea Cathedral, Co. Galway. It was executed in 1903 as part of a commission awarded to the fledgling Dun Emer Guild, which was founded in 1902 by Evelyn Gleeson. Her two principal partners in the venture were Jack Yeats’ sisters, Susan and Elizabeth (or Lily and Lolly as they were known to family and friends). When the Guild received this prestigious commission, they invited Jack and his wife Mary (known as Cottie) to supply designs for the banners. Jack designed the Sacred Heart banner and the banners for all the male saints bar two (these were designed by George Russell (Æ)), whilst Cottie supplied designs for nearly all of the female saints. In all, twenty-nine banners were completed, with a further four designs including the present work of St Alphonsus being executed but ultimately not used. In the present work Yeats depicts St Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787), Founder of the Redemptionist Fathers. In common with other Loughrea designs, the figure is drawn in heavy black outline, with a richly coloured cassock and his cloak decorated in what Paul Larmour has described as “an almost cloisonné-like manner” of Celtic ornamentation. (‘The Dun Emer Guild’, Irish Arts Review, Vol. 1 No. 4, Winter 1984, p.25). At the time of the commission, The Irish Homestead described the banners as displaying “freshness and quaint naturalness”, combined with “sympathy and native feeling” and hailed them as the start “of a new epoch in art work of this kind, wherein originality of design shall replace vulgarity and simple beauty replace tawdriness” (13 February 1904, p. 134).
Medium
watercolour and gouache over pencil
Signature
signed in monogram lower right
Provenance
Miss Lily Yeats;
Miss Hyland;
Purchased by Thomas MacGreevy c.1958;
James Adam Salerooms, Dublin, April 1968;
Private collection;
Whyte's, 22 February 2005, lot 93;
Private collection
Literature
F.L. Cross (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1974, page 39;
Hilary Pyle, Jack B Yeats: His Watercolours, Drawings and Pastels, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1993, catalogue no. 459, p. 12
