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'Well, I'm sure the least we can do, Mr Yeats,
is persuade you to talk about your paintings.'
'I'm not so sure that you can.
'I'm not at all fond of talking about my own
or other painter's work.
'I never lecture about painting. I don't even interrupt at lectures.
'But I enjoy hearing other people talk.'
(V/O) It was the landscape that made the difference.
The high sky over Sligo.
The swirling clouds.
The shifting light from the Atlantic.
Jack Butler Yeats, whether he was in London, or in Devon,
or in Dublin, was passionately engaged with Irish light.
And with the atmosphere created by an Irish crowd.
He loved gatherings.
The fierce energy of spectators at a sporting event
or the excitement of the horse races.
But Jack Yeats was not a simple man.
He was a mystery to his friends and his family.
A solitary figure, often silent.
A watchful man.
As well as crowds,
he was fascinated by the lone figure in the landscape.
He too, was a lone figure in the landscape.
As a painter, he was not a member of any school.
On his own, he discovered a way to paint the light
and the landscape of his country.
Abandoning all caution,
like someone betting every penny in his pocket
on a horse that lived in his dreams.
This is the story of Jack Butler Yeats.
The man who painted Ireland.
He was in a family who were very brilliant.
And I can imagine what it could be like.
They were really much more extrovert than him.
Certainly, his brother had been groomed as a poet
from the moment he was born, practically.
Placing Jack Yeats is difficult and he knew that.
There's a lovely thing he said
when he was recalling his brother, WB,
the great poet, after he died. He said they were chatting,
a couple of years before WB died and his brother said,
they were talking about somebody else,
how will he appear in history?
And Jack instantly said, "Men of genius are not in history."
With William Yeats and Jack Yeats, you have to be careful
and as subtle as can be,
because it's not just sibling rivalry you're talking about.
It might seem like that because their images are so different,
where WB Yeats is so much a '90s poet.
He's got floppy hair, he seems myopic,
he, sort of, seems to talk in poetry.
Whereas Jack was mainly silent, he dressed in a very plain way,
and it looks as though their manners were entirely different.
But one of the things they had in common
was an interest in transcendence.
(V/O) Although Jack put thought into the titles of his paintings,
he never wanted to explain what a painting meant.
That was not the question.
The question was, what does a painting do?
He was not interested in just making an image of a landscape,
as a photograph does.
His landscapes are mythical, filled with shifting light
and shimmering colours.
We look at them with wonder.
The painter had not only captured what Sligo looks like...
..but he has transformed it.
Jack Yeats, born in London, in 1871,
might have lived all his life in the shadow of his older brother,
the poet, William Butler Yeats.
From an early age, WB Yeats wrote poems about Irish mythology
and unrequited love.
He was interested in theosophy and magic.
He liked committees.
Jack, on the other hand, loved the real world.
He had no interest in unrequited love, he went his own way.
Jack was an independent spirit.
Jack Yeats is part of a family of artists, not only the father,
a wonderful painter, but his sisters, Lolly and Lily,
who were craft artists
and who worked at the Dun Emer Press and the Cuala Press.
And of course, his brother, the poet,
who was preoccupied by visual art all his life,
wrote about it all his life.
So Jack Yeats grows up in a family saturated in art,
and they're a family who disagree violently about things.
And there's a wonderful recollection of WB's,
where they have such a strong argument, he and his father,
that his father, though he later denied this,
breaks the glass of a picture over WB's head.
And the two boys go to their room
and they hear the father coming up the stairs,
and Jack says to his brother, "Not a word till he apologises."
(V/O) As they grew older, the two Yeats brothers
turned out to have much in common.
They both set out to enrich Ireland with their art,
and to explore mysterious regions of experience,
the soul, what memory means,
the power a single image can have in a poem,
a play, a painting.
Jack Yeats took certain things from his father, for example,
a belief somehow that your job in the world is to live properly,
is to take advantage of life.
The word "life" meant a great deal for both of them,
as did the word "art". But that's as far as it went.
The father was indolent, he didn't finish things.
Jack Yeats was a great finisher.
The father didn't do commercial art because he thought,
you know, it was beneath him.
It was never beneath Jack to make a living.
It's a common thing, I mean, in other words,
the son becomes the opposite to the father.
I think it's very, very difficult for us
to get any full picture of the relationship
between the Yeats' children and their mother,
because we don't really have any correspondence.
When Jack made his first money as an illustrator,
the first thing he did with the money
was he paid for medical bills for his mother.
In other words, we have one clue that at least he cared for her
as she was ailing and sick.
It's very difficult to get a bigger picture than that,
other than, of course, she was a Pollexfen
and he was more a Pollexfen than a Yeats.
In other words, they gave him Sligo.
(V/O) John Butler Yeats, Jack's father,
had come to London to seek fame as a painter,
but he could not make a living.
This meant that Jack spent much of his childhood
with his mother's family, the Pollexfens, in Sligo.
He was brought up, in his formative years,
away from the family.
They, Susan, would have been very happy to have had Jack in Sligo
because she missed Sligo so much.
In a way, you'd wonder why she didn't go back
and live there with him.
But they may have done it because Susan was not very strong.
It was getting difficult for the family.
She hadn't very good health.
This is the 1870s, 1880s, this is the Victorian period,
children are sent routinely away from their families.
Mrs Yeats' family, the Pollexfens,
are well-off Sligo merchants.
We might think it odd that Jack is packed off,
when he's quite young, to live with his grandparents,
but it's not that unusual.
And he's sent to Sligo, which is ravishingly beautiful,
which has the most extraordinary watery Atlantic light,
and this affects and implicates Jack's work from then on.
And much of his late work, I think, is a flashback
to what he saw and absorbed in Sligo, which he adored.
(V/O) What Jack saw in Sligo changed his life.
The play of light over the Atlantic.
How colours shifted as the clouds gathered and were swept away.
This was an Ireland that had appeared in illustrations
and been told in stories.
But, in all its wildness...
..it had not been captured in paint.
I think that Jack Yeats, as he developed
and evolved as an artist,
certainly was revolutionary within the genre of Irish art.
He broke ranks with everybody that was out there.
And he strove to share and portray
the basic sentiments of humankind through his paintings.
Yeats was always interested in this idea of constant change
and movement and that's what he sees manifest in nature.
So, light is always changing,
especially in the west of Ireland.
Certain colours are exaggerated,
you know, there'd be flecks of yellows and pinks and reds
on parts of his paintings, because that is the direction
that the light is hitting them on.
And it distorts the form and it distorts the colour,
but at the same time, it gives us clues as to what these forms are
and how they relate to each other.
Look at this painting Jack made in 1946.
It is called Mountain Window.
Look first at the draftsman's skill.
Look at the yellow as it hits the outline of the window,
making it seem luminous, lit like something in a dream.
The painting is dominated by the molten light that comes
from a dream version of the sun, or the moon, over Ben Bulben.
Some shapes are exact and carefully delineated.
The curtains and the foliage make this a real room.
Looking onto a scene that has been transformed by the painter
into something that transcends memory.
A landscape of the soul.
And my passion for the work of Jack Yeats stems from that room.
That room, in the National Gallery,
where it was just his work.
And the miracle of painting is how much of the shape
do you create and how many points of reference
do you put into it?
You know there is intention for something else to be there,
it's either a landscape or death or a horse, a lot of the time.
I'm looking at the painting and going, "Is there a horse there?
Is there not a horse there?"
But there is something that is there.
And the amount of information you give,
how that goes from your brain, saying, "I'm thinking of a horse,
but all I have to do is that. That'll be fine. That's enough.
That's enough. That's enough. Horse."
That to me, is a miracle.
Yeats was a great documentarian of everyday life.
He had a fascination, it seems, with so many different parts
of normal life that were perhaps overlooked
or ignored by other people or other artists.
He saw the magic or the wonder, or the heroic even,
in everyday scenes,
not just in, the kind of, heroic deeds of the revolutionaries,
but in what actually happened on the street
and how the people of Dublin lived through it.
We all, kind of, regard ourselves as observers.
What we're doing is we're inside, but we're, kind of,
giving ourselves the right to step out
and talk about what we've just seen.
But you need to have, kind of, a toe outside.
It's one of the reasons it's useful to come to the UK,
like I did, as an Irish person and be the intelligent alien,
going, "I'm not from here but I've noticed this about you",
and that may have been a thing that he was able to do
from going forward and back, to step into Ireland for a while,
to see it with different eyes and step away again.
The Yeatses lived in Bedford Park,
a London suburb, Chiswick suburb,
which had become a kind of artists' colony.
The houses were cheap, though very attractive.
There were gardens, there was a local theatre,
there was a pub where they all met.
And it can't be underestimated, I think,
how much this meant for all the children in the family.
The girls worked with the William Morris workshops
and learned a lot of their marvellous crafts of embroidery,
and bookbinding and so forth, there.
Willy met publishers, fellow poets.
GK Chesterton was a neighbour and Jack absorbed this as well.
At the age of 16, Jack went to art school in London.
But he was much too interested in the world outside
to be a brilliant student.
He was already making drawings and illustrations,
taking commissions where he could find them.
Jack worked diligently as an illustrator and a cartoonist,
and a caricaturist in these London years.
He was not a painter yet.
That would not happen until he returned
to live in Ireland for good.
So Jack is picking up both artistic impressions
and artistic influences from what's around him.
But also he's observing, he's a flaneur,
he walks the streets and takes notes.
He's doing that in London when he's young
and when he's doing drawings for Punch magazine,
under the name of Bird, which was a pseudonym.
But he's doing it later when he's a much more established painter,
and he's painting the great scenes that will emerge,
especially in his paintings at the time of the Irish Revolution.
These wonderful paintings of Dublin life at a moment of crisis
relate directly back to the way that he has always sketched
what goes on around him and absorbed it
with this deft, ironic, slightly zany approach.
He was born in London, went back over to Sligo...
..to be raised by his grandparents,
then came back and lived with the family in Chiswick,
then moved to Devon and visited Ireland during the summer.
So there's a kind of, not a question mark of his Irishness,
in any kind of way that he has to prove anything about this.
But it's interesting, given that he was here and raised here
for large parts of his life, that the Irish landscape
was the one that was more interesting,
that he didn't chronicle Britain at all.
That all of his work was about Ireland,
like, that had that huge capture of his imagination.
At Bedford Park in London, where the Yeats family lived,
exile seemed to intensify their interest in Ireland.
Ireland was becoming a cauldron of change and possibility,
that was not only political, but artistic.
In his own poems, William invoked the same Sligo landscape
that fascinated Jack.
Finding images that would capture a changing Ireland
and creating new images to replace or intensify old myths.
Slowly, Jack Yeats, whose destiny might have been
to spend his life in England, was enticed into this new realm.
Into a new way of seeing and imagining Ireland.
If you ask Jack Yeats what he learned from, as a painter,
he would probably have said he learned from life.
When Lady Gregory takes up the Yeatses, first WB,
then the whole family, she decrees, in her seigniorial way,
that Jack must go to Paris.
But he didn't and he knew he didn't want to.
He is unpretentious throughout his life.
And I think he's very conscious of his own abilities,
he has no false pride about that,
but where he's learning from is what he sees.
Living is itself almost an art form,
and that's what he learns from, groundedness,
in learning from the occupation of living.
In the 1890s, in his 20s,
Jack let his family know that he had met
the woman he intended to marry.
Her name was Mary Cottenham White, she was known as Cottie.
She became his lifelong companion.
In Devon, they settled into a stable, domestic existence.
While he'd found a tranquillity, Ireland was stirring in him.
Part of what's happening at the time of the Celtic Revival,
which is segwaying into what we see as the long Irish Revolution,
is a search for authenticity.
I think for artists like the Yeatses,
their careers are, in a sense, formed in London,
but to get back to Ireland
is to have access to a kind of authenticity.
In the summer of 1888, his trip to Sligo was filled with activity.
The Ireland that appears in his work from these years
is affectionate and perfect in its way,
but it could have been made by an outsider.
As Jack was making clear from this work,
that Jack Yeats had not yet come home.
The centenary of 1798, the 1798 Rising,
the centenary of that in 1898 was enormously important
for the radicalisation of Irish nationalism.
It gave a, kind of, shot in the arm to revived Fenianism.
It was very important for WB Yeats,
who was much involved in the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee
and was at his most Fenian stage himself at that time.
For Jack, it was the experience
of the Bartholomew Teeling Memorial,
who was one of the 1798 martyrs.
It was the experience of his memorial that really, I think,
begins his interest in a, kind of, Irish national history.
Thus, in the summer of 1898, on a trip to Ireland...
..Jack Yeats underwent a great change.
This was a new, emerging Ireland.
You know, one thing he said in his manifesto and elsewhere,
he always says, "The best artist paints what he loves."
And he loves his country, too, you know.
So when he lived in Devon, he was very much away from Ireland,
but he was conscious of his love of Ireland
and how much it meant to him.
So, when he came back, the first decade of the century,
there was this great buzz.
Things were changing so much...
..and he involved himself
in the preparation for Ireland being free
because home rule had been promised.
In the National Archives in Dublin,
there is the 1911 census entry for Jack Yeats and his wife, Cottie,
who are living now in Greystones, County Wicklow,
having left Devon in 1910.
We can see Jack's customary signature.
He has come home.
Jack entered the Gaelic revival movement
his brother was engaged in,
a tradition that rejoiced in its own language, its books and plays.
He was ready to capture the life from which it emanated,
the love of poetry, of legend, of idiosyncratic character.
Free to become the artist he wants to be.
It's interesting how much that he would have been swept up
by the explosion of culture and nationalism around that time.
It probably would have been impossible not to. What I feel,
I'm probably more telling you, is his literary connections.
The easiest parallel to draw is actually with Joyce,
because Joyce is like, his idea of Dublin is
a series of vignettes of emotional moments
in ordinary life, which is exactly what he was doing
as an illustrator for the first 30-40 years of his career,
and then Joyce became increasingly abstract.
And that same movement occurred,
which is, you chronicle, you learn your skills,
and then, once you've mastered that,
that allows you then the freedom,
as he said himself, Yeats said, "To drop the line."
The change, when Jack returned to live in Ireland,
was not just in the extent of his ambition.
Ireland too, was going through a transformation.
We can see this struggle in the work Jack did
for a study by George A Birmingham of 12 different Irish types
in 1913, entitled Irishmen All.
These are people, rather than abstract creations.
The figures here are alive.
Jack is as concerned with their humanity, their singleness,
as he is with them as typical citizens of a changing Ireland.
Yet, as Europe prepared for war and Ireland for insurrection,
a battle was raging in Jack's imagination...
..between the illustrator he had been
and the artist he would become.
He's, as I keep explaining to people,
he was evolving all the time.
His art was evolving all the time.
And he never intended to be a revolutionary,
or he never intended to be an expressionist, for that matter.
It grew on him and he naturally evolved into what he was doing.
He's an evolutionary.
'What would you say to me now if I tell you that there are
several of your paintings that I just don't understand?'
'The answer to that question could only be completely answered
in a lecture, I've said that I don't lecture.
'But I would say you could not possibly understand
all of any painting of mine,
any more than you could understand
all of the feelings of any living being.
'And there's no book of words,
no direction that you
or anyone else can understand all about painting.
'I dislike the word art as to painting.
'There is only one art and that is the art of living.
'Painting is an occupation within that art
and that occupation is the freest of all the occupations of living.
'There is no alphabet, no grammar, no rules whatever.
'It is carried out in the face of the enemy.'
Undoubtedly, Yeats' art is evocative.
As I said earlier, it captures an emotion.
To me, a lot of the scenes, the attribution of emotion,
be it fear, hate, love, death,
Jack Yeats makes you question yourself
as you look into his paintings,
makes you mentally explore what he's trying to portray to you,
and how he's trying to portray it.
Jack found that his memory was so powerful
that he did not need to get wet to paint water,
or to stand in the landscape to paint the horizon.
He could create the excitement of what he saw in the studio
when he was alone.
But it was not just that he remembered,
he travelled with a sketchbook to set the spark.
Jack lived with a store of images
and from these, he could imagine scenes.
And these scenes in all their drama came to him powerfully,
forcefully, until he could make from them images that were fresh
and real and true.
Bachelor's Walk, In Memory is a powerful and important painting
and it epitomises a moment when everything changed.
In April 1914, guns were landed at Larne in County Antrim
for possible use in defending Ulster from home rule.
Government turned a blind eye to that,
didn't turn a blind eye to what happened in Howth
when guns were run in and in a fracas on Bachelor's Walk,
the Scottish Borderers shot into a crowd of demonstrators,
killing people.
Jack Yeats, his sketchbooks show how closely he followed this,
he walked the streets in the days afterwards,
he took a very careful drawing of a place on the quays
where a cross had been chalked on the wall
to memorialise those who had been killed.
The painting isn't of that particular corner,
but it shows that he was looking at the memorial
that this incident had set up.
The painting itself, it's a very beautiful image of a young girl,
rather a Kathleen Ni Houlihan figure, I think,
representing Ireland, laying a flower on a ledge
and in an almost religious gesture.
Jack did not seek to capture the shooting, the panic,
the army versus the crowd, the immediacy.
Visiting the scene,
he noticed that people had left roses where the dead had fallen.
Thus becoming the image he wanted to work with,
one of dignified remembrance and stillness.
A young woman leaving a flower in memory of the dead.
Yeah, memory, it was hugely important...hugely important
to Yeats and to his work as well,
as a theme, as a source of subject matter,
as a way of thinking about the world, I guess.
And what was left behind was flowers scattered on the ground
and a memory in the space or in the environment,
of the violent episode that had taken place there.
She is, you know, just a wonderful figure,
expressing this idea of mourning and loss.
And he imagines this, he didn't see this particular event,
he has imagined this and then he goes back,
probably the following year, to make that painting
when he, sort of, digested, if you like, that particular moment.
The painting is a depiction of the power of aftermath.
If this is Jack's first openly political painting,
it is created with subtlety and care.
She also symbolises feeling and memory in Ireland in 1915,
a time when Jack's interest in crowds and gatherings...
..is becoming more sombre, more complex.
On Easter Monday, 1916,
Irish rebel leaders launched an armed revolt
against British rule in Ireland.
The British military response was swift and devastating.
Dublin streets were left in ruin.
The events would become a tipping point for Ireland's revolution
and the war for independence that would follow.
I think we have to look at the 1916 Rebellion very carefully
because later on, it was seen as heroic.
But all we have to do is imagine
that the city of Dublin was being bombed to bits
and that the leaders are going to be executed one-by-one
over a period of, say, two weeks.
It was not merely that a group of thugs had taken over the city,
or a group of die-hards that no-one knew,
these were well-known figures in the city.
And Jack Yeats, at this point, is back living in Ireland
and suddenly, the world crumbles.
For us, at 100 years or more removed, it's almost unthinkable
like, what the 1916 Rising was like
for those who lived to see the city destroyed,
to see the instigators of the Rising, you know,
executed so publicly and so shockingly.
I think, for Jack, that certainly didn't aid his recovery.
In the years after the 1916 Rebellion,
Jack Yeats suffered from depression and uncertainty.
What has come to him with so much hope, the idea of a new Ireland,
had resulted in the death of civilians in Dublin city centre
and the execution of the leaders of the rebellion.
In the words of William Butler Yeats,
"What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night, but death.
Was it needless death after all?"
Jack too, did not find stability when he came back to Ireland.
Instead of race meetings and big gatherings,
it was forced by events that haunted the public imagination,
to become a documentarian in Ireland,
making iconic paintings of the Irish revolutionary period.
Such as The Funeral Of Harry Boland
and the stark and haunting painting,
Communicating With Prisoners.
Politically, I think he has been, as so many people were,
deeply saddened and disillusioned by the Civil War.
He doesn't approve of the treaty, unlike his brother,
who is a very strong supporter of it and his sisters too actually.
The events of the war and of the Civil War,
affect him deeply, that's clear from the way he painted them.
But his style is also changing
and a painting that epitomises this is
the marvellous, fluid painting, The Liffey Swim of 1923.
So, one of the things that I find fascinating
about the progression of Yeats' style and technique
was that it changed so dramatically later in his life.
The Liffey Swim is often talked about in terms of an early phase
of his oil painting career but he was actually in his early 50s
when he made that painting.
It's often used as a painting to show this move away
from illustration, flat colours, line,
towards a more fluid, expressive technique.
And that was what he did. He suddenly found that his brush,
it didn't want to be surrounded with an outline.
You can just see this happening
because you can actually see the line
and then you can see where he's left the line out.
But you see his brushwork almost coming out at you.
Early in the life of the new state,
he made an iconic image of Dublin,
not only at peace but at play.
In this painting, he could not only explore the atmosphere
in the new state but experiment with colour and form.
Jack began to think about Irish light and the Irish sky.
Jack's project was to make paintings
that do not strive for perfection...
..but for something that matches the excitement
that he himself took from life.
Jack Yeats, for me, the most exciting thing about him,
is that he settled on his style when he was 54 years old,
which if you like, I work in a populist art form,
I'd be delighted to think in five years, I'm 49,
in five years' time, I'm suddenly going to go Expressionist.
That would be amazing if that was my journey as well.
Suddenly at that age I realise, "I've learned how to do this,
I don't need the crowds any more.
I don't need to worry about DVD sales.
I'm going to make a series of vague pieces that people can draw
their own interpretation on."
That would be a lovely way to see out your 70s.
What Jack Yeats is doing in the '30s is, I think,
very interesting, not only in terms of the way
his painting is getting, some would say wilder,
certainly more Expressionist but also, he's beginning to write.
He's writing plays, he's writing novels,
they're very surreal, adventurous.
They're very niche, they don't sell a lot,
the plays are occasionally put on,
but only in a very experimental way.
But it's of a peace, I think, with the way
that his painting itself is, if you can use the word, literary.
The people who start following his work very passionately
and indeed buying it, notably are often writers themselves.
Ernie O'Malley, who wrote the great books
about the Irish Revolution, On Another Man's Wound,
and The Singing Flame, also very famously, slightly later,
Samuel Beckett becomes heavily preoccupied by Yeats' paintings
and intuits in them a, kind of, breaking of barriers.
In the 1930s, Jack became more adventurous in his use of colour
and more ambitious in the panoramas he created.
Now, the scene he saw, or remembered,
was no longer the focus of the painting.
Rather, it was his own emotion
that gave the painting its immediacy.
At the very centre of his work was the power to transform.
Now we have Lot 35.
Fantastic work by Jack Butler Yeats, Death For Only One.
Yes, I have a bid of 300,000 here on the book at 300,
320, 340, 380 with him. 400.
I may break up in this one but, er...
(CLEARS THROAT)
..the painting, Death For Only One, is clearly about
two people who have been friends.
And, er...
At this time in my life, having been...
..married for 48 years.
(SNIFFS)
I just can't look at the painting.
In 2019, an auction took place in Dublin...
..where a collection of Jack Butler Yeats' paintings,
once owned by Irish revolutionary, Ernie O'Malley,
sold for record-breaking figures.
Becoming a landmark moment for Irish art.
I first saw Death For Only One
in Cormac's house in Stonington, Connecticut,
and it was a good few years ago,
and I was very taken by the painting
and it was his favourite painting at that time.
And I suppose in a way, it related, to a certain extent,
to his own father's death, mainly because of the injuries
he suffered during the War of Independence,
which left him very unhealthy.
But when I went to see him,
when we were discussing selling the collection in Dublin,
he had taken it down off the wall.
A lot of himself in that picture, in a way and it really related,
I think, to two deaths in his family, his father and his wife.
Death For Only One could be interpreted in many ways.
I see it as just a human experience,
but you can interpret that also in a nationalist sense.
You know, the past is gone and the future is ahead.
When you talk about the particular sale,
the O'Malley sale...
..I think what I was first drawn to was the name of the painting.
I mean, Death For Only One,
I mean, what does that portray to you?
What was the emotion that it was capturing?
And it totally intrigued me.
Two...tramps, one dead,
the other standing over the corpse in a bog.
Why was that not in a room? Why was it in a bog?
Was the immenseness of the bog
another way of expressing eternity?
It may, perversely, even capture joy
if we believed that the corpse has gone to a better place.
This is not a history painting.
It is not a depiction of something exact
that happened in the Irish past.
Jack did not try to explain the world,
but instead sought to enrich our sense of its mystery.
He painted so that the world could surprise him.
Beckett loved Yeats, not for what he did with the light of Sligo,
but for the light of eternity.
His figures took on an aspect that was almost religious,
certainly spiritual but he offered no easy comfort.
They were alone.
In 1945, in a book review, Samuel Beckett wrote of Yeats...
"He is with the great of our time because he brings light,
as only the great dare bring light,
to the issueless predicament of existence."
In 1939, William Butler Yeats died in France.
In his late poems, he was defiant against old age,
or any easy acceptance of decrepitude and death.
Even though he had lived most of his life in Dublin and London,
he wrote, "In a sense, Sligo has always been my home."
When he wanted to evoke a sense of freedom
and energy in his poem, The Tower, he remembered Sligo.
"Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible
No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back
And had the livelong summer day to spend."
In the latter years of WB's life,
when he's living in Rathfarnham in the 1930s,
there is quite a bit of coming and going with Jack.
They go on walks together, they visit, they talk.
So they are closer at the end, in a sense,
than they were at the beginning.
When WB dies, in the South of France, in January 1939,
it's Jack who comes to tell the sisters that it's happened.
There's a wonderful description in one of Lily's letters,
where she says, "He said nothing,
he just threw his arm up in the air in a gesture,
as if to say, 'Gone'."
Both Yeats brothers were enchanted by Sligo,
as though it were a form of magic.
The same Ben Bulben haunted William
that would haunt the paintings of Jack.
They both carried with them images of that sky
and the life lived on the edge of the Atlantic.
In their imaginations, nothing ever replaced it.
I think it's possible to ask any artist, including any writer,
"What is it you've lost?"
That a lot of people work out of loss.
Even a house that's not there any more,
someone who's not there any more
or an atmosphere that's not there any more.
And in the experience of Jack Yeats, he began to imagine
that very idea that this could disappear, this could be wiped.
The sense of the paint sometimes as so sketchily placed on,
or so wet, that in a second it could be scraped or wiped off,
that it's just caught, it's not pure and whole.
It's impure and tentative.
I will paint impurity because the pure would be too easy to make.
Jack Yeats' marriage was, I think, very central to his life
and to the stability of his life.
And she was an artist too, of course,
and worked for Dun Emer and Cuala.
But it was one of those, I think, very interdependent,
close, childless marriages,
which left Jack, obviously, bereft when she died.
And there are some great paintings, which are very much,
I think, painted in the wake of her illness and death.
He then goes to live in the Portobello nursing home
for the last few years of his life,
while at the same time his artistic imagination,
and he paints right on into his 80s,
is in some ways never more flaring and explosive and jolting
than in these last years and these last paintings, which have,
as I say, to do with, I think,
a visionary sense of something to come.
In this time between his wife, Cottie's death,
and his own death in 1957...
..he allowed for the possibility of transcendence,
letting blues and indigos make the skies and landscape appear
like colours from a vivid dream.
The composition of this great painting shows real daring.
A, sort of, carefree response to structure and tone.
An insistence that it is not the task of the painter
to obey any rules or reflect what is merely visible.
Instead, it is the task of the painter to see beyond reality
and beyond dreams, towards a pictorial space
that is alive with paint,
that pulls our eye in towards the lone figure,
offering a sense of the human dilemma.
A wildness that unsettles the self.
'I'd like to bring it back to painting again and ask you
if you have any advice to offer to a young painter?'
'No, there is no advice I could give.
'I gave up giving advice years ago.
'I never found it a success.
'But if any teacher-minded painter felt like giving advice,
he might suggest to the young painter
not to swallow any advice without rolling it over in his own mouth,
and then telling himself that it was his own idea.
'After that, when he faces his canvas to begin painting,
he will have no third party opinions to consider,
not even the opinions of an imaginary friend or foe,
who is to view his picture when it's finished.
'They will then be just the two of them, his painting and himself.
'If this sounds like advice,
then remember, it is subject to revision,
and when I am 12 hours older, I might like to change it.'
(V/O) Jack's journey was not towards wisdom.
In his interview with Eamonn Andrews,
he spoke about the art that mattered as the art of life.
This was what his father had said, too.
It was life that mattered.
Alone in the studio, he discovered that he would never know
what life was or what it meant.
To know it, would be to simplify it.
Painting what he did not know would do more, mean more,
than trying to fix the world in an image,
pin it down, take the mystery out of it.
The art of living was the art of exploration, of setting out,
moving west, under the high and shifting sky.
That is what Jack did for as long as he could
in his studio in Dublin.
That is what he gave to the world.
The art of not arriving, but the sheer excitement of setting out,
going on, the freedom of seeing the world
as no-one else had ever done.
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