(b London, 29 Aug 1871; d Dublin, 28 March 1957). Painter, writer and graphic artist, son of (1) John Butler Yeats. He was the younger brother of the poet W. B. Yeats. He spent much of his boyhood in Co. Sligo and maintained that the landscape and light of the county inspired him to become a painter. In London he sporadically attended various art schools, including the Westminster School of Art, and worked as a black-and-white illustrator, chiefly for magazines. His early paintings were in watercolour, and he was over 30 before he began to work regularly in oils. For years his style remained essentially conservative, with some influence from Honoré Daumier, but in the mid-1920s a profound change began to take place. Yeats’s handling grew much freer, his forms were defined by brushstrokes rather than by line, his hitherto dour colours grew richer and more luminous and his earlier realism gradually gave way to a moody, intimate and highly personal romanticism. These tendencies grew even more marked over the next two decades, for example in About to Write a Letter (1935; Dublin, N.G.), until in Yeats’s final years subject-matter is sometimes buried and almost obliterated by rich impasto, bravura brushwork and flame-like areas of colour, as in Grief (1951; Dublin, N.G.).

Part of the Yeats family

• Yeats, Jack B(utler)
  • Ireland, §III, 4: Painting and graphic arts, after 1900
  • Ireland, §XII: Patronage
  • Ireland, §XIII: Collecting and dealing