(b Tullylish, Co. Down, 12 March 1839; d New York, 3 Feb 1922). Painter and draughtsman. He was the father of the poet W. B. Yeats and (2) Jack B. Yeats. In 1867, after studying law in Dublin, he moved to London, where he enrolled at Heatherley’s Art School. He later worked under the supervision of Edward Poynter. For the first 20 years of his career Yeats produced illustrations and genre and landscape paintings: ‘Pippa Passes’ (1869–72; Dublin, N.G.), a large gouache, is distinctly Pre-Raphaelite. In the late 1880s he began to realize his gifts as a portrait painter, although his production was hampered by a lifelong inability to finish commissions on time. Over a period of 50 years he produced fewer than 100 oil paintings, his greatest output being pencil drawings. The best of these are of his family and friends. He was an admirer of George Frederick Watts and saw a similarity between Watts’s approach to portrait painting and his own. In an essay on Watts written in 1906, Yeats wrote: ‘the best portraits will be painted where the relationship of the sitter and the painter is one of friendship’. An example of this is his drawing of John M. Synge (1905; Dublin, N.G.). The portraits of his family are intimate and reflective, while those of his literary associates convey character and conviction. Yeats’s interest in the modern school originated in his admiration for the tonal naturalism of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, while his understanding of Impressionism was gained through the writings of R. A. M. Stevenson (1847–1900). The drawings and oils of the turn of the century are in many ways the artist’s most satisfying works.

Part of the Yeats family

• Yeats, John Butler
  • Ireland, §III, 4: Painting and graphic arts, after 1900