John Butler Yeats: the painter who could never finish
In February 1911 the New York lawyer John Quinn commissioned a self-portrait from a seventy-one-year-old Irish painter living in a boarding house on West 29th Street. The painter worked on it for eleven years. He was still working on it when he died. It was never finished, and he thought it was the best thing he had ever done.
That is John Butler Yeats in one commission: enormous gift, no ending.
The rectory, the Bar, and the decision
He was born on 16 March 1839 at Tullylish, Co. Down, the eldest of nine children of the Church of Ireland rector there. He entered Trinity College Dublin in 1857, graduated with honours and a prize in political economy, was called to the Irish Bar in 1866, devilled briefly with Isaac Butt — and decided not to practise.
In 1867 he moved to London with his infant son Willie and his daughter Lily and enrolled at Heatherley's School of Fine Art. He had a wife, a family and no income. It is the decision that produced the Yeatses, and it cost them everything for forty years. As Wikipedia's summary of his finances puts it plainly, he was a poor businessman and was never financially secure; W.B. wrote that his father remained a poor man to the end of his life.
Sligo
He had married Susan Mary Pollexfen at St John's in Sligo on 10 September 1863. The Pollexfens were a substantial Sligo merchant and shipping family who had been happy enough with a barrister and considerably less happy with a painter. The Sligo that runs through W.B.'s poems and Jack's pictures came into the family through her.
Six children: William Butler (1865), Lily (1866), Elizabeth — “Lolly” — (1868), Robert (1870, died at three), Jack (1871), and Jane Grace (1875, died at nine months). Lily and Lolly went on to found the Cuala Press.
Why he could not finish
W.B. Yeats described his father's method better than any critic has: “Instead of finishing a picture one square inch at a time, he kept all fluid, every detail dependent upon every other.”
That is a description of a technique, but it is also a description of a trap. A picture built that way is never structurally complete. There is no corner you can call done. Every new observation reopens the whole surface. Sitters waited. Commissions lapsed. The money never arrived.
It could go the other way. His portrait of W.B. Yeats of 1900, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, took three sittings. He painted it the day before his wife died.
The faces of the Revival
He was, by his own account, unsuited to society portraiture and drawn instead to people he knew. “The best portraits will be painted where the relation of the sitter and the painter is one of friendship,” he wrote. Which is why the Revival sat for him: John O'Leary, Standish O'Grady, George Moore, AE, Douglas Hyde, Father Dinneen, J. M. Synge in 1905, Augusta Gregory in 1903, the actress Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh in 1904, and Maud Gonne in 1907.
Padraic Colum remembered him bringing a sketchbook to dinner and drawing the people around him while he argued about art. “A sketch is far better,” Yeats said, “reveals more of a man portrayed than the best photograph.”
The National Gallery of Ireland holds 103 works by him. The core group of Revival portraits arrived there in 1926, presented in memory of John Quinn — the patron's collection coming home after his death.
The commission he could not deliver
In 1901 Sarah Purser mounted a joint exhibition of John Butler Yeats and Nathaniel Hone in Dublin and brought a young dealer named Hugh Lane to see it. Lane commissioned from him — reluctantly given, by all accounts — a series of portraits of distinguished Irishmen. By the time Yeats left for America he had completed five of them.
New York
In December 1907, aged sixty-eight, he sailed for New York aboard the Campania with his daughter Lily. It was meant to be a short trip. He stayed fourteen years and never came back.
From October 1909 he lived at the boarding house run by the three Petitpas sisters at 317 West 29th Street, where his conversation drew a standing circle of young artists and writers, among them the Ashcan School painters. Quinn paid his bills, partly in exchange for W.B.'s manuscripts. Asked why he did not go home, Yeats answered that “to leave New York is to leave a huge fair where any moment I might meet with some huge bit of luck.”
In America he became known for his talk and his letters more than for his painting; the collected Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others appeared in 1944. Of the unfinished self-portrait he wrote: “It is like watching a blessed ghost of a long lost beloved slowly materialising.”
He died at the boarding house on 3 February 1922, aged eighty-two, and is buried at Chestertown Rural Cemetery in New York State. The self-portrait sold at Sotheby's in 2017 and was given to the Niland Collection in Sligo, which is about as close to home as it was ever going to get.
Where to see him
The National Gallery of Ireland has by far the largest holding — 103 works, including the 1900 W.B. Yeats and the Revival group. The Hugh Lane has an earlier oil of W.B. as a young man, given by Lane in 1912. The Model in Sligo has the self-portrait.
The John Butler Yeats collection holds the portraits as archival prints, framed or unframed, and the John Butler Yeats artist page follows his life from the Down rectory to West 29th Street. Every print is open edition and made to order.