seamus dubhghaill

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Death of Olive Henry, Northern Irish Artist

Olive Henry, Northern Irish artist known for her painting, photography and stained glass design, dies on November 8, 1989, in Crawfordsburn, County Down, Northern Ireland. She is a founding member of the Ulster Society of Women Artists and is believed to be the only female stained glass artist working in Northern Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century.

Henry is born in Belfast on January 15, 1902, the daughter of the tea merchant George Adams Henry. She attends Mount Pottinger National School, and Victoria College, before expanding her studies at night classes at the Belfast School of Art.

Henry completes an apprenticeship at Clokey Stained Glass Studios founded by Walter Francis Clokey where she is to work for over fifty years designing stained glass windows. Her appointment in the autumn of 1919 comes by a chance visit to Victoria College by the firm’s owner who is seeking a suitable apprentice. She retires from the firm at Easter 1972.

In addition to her stained glass work, Henry exhibits her paintings widely in the Oireachtas, Belfast Art Society, Royal Ulster Academy, Royal Hibernian Academy, the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, Water Colour Society of Ireland, Belfast Museum and Art Gallery (now the Ulster Museum) and the National Society in London. She is a founding member, with Gladys Maccabe, of the Ulster Society of Women Artists and is president of the society from 1979 to 1981.

Henry exhibits at the Belfast Art Society for the first time in 1928. She exhibits four works, all landscapes in oil, and then a further two works in the following year. In 1931, she shows a further two works with the successor to the Belfast Art Society, the Ulster Academy of Arts. In 1932, she shows A Derbyshire Village, described by one critic as “a delightful English rural scene.” Between 1931 and 1942 she shows with more than twenty paintings at the Ulster Academy of Arts, exhibiting at each annual show in that time.

Henry has a keen interest in photography from an early age and wins various awards for her photographs. In 1934, she wins the August prize from the Photographic Dealers’ Association for a shot of a child playing with toys in the bath, having received a consolation prize of five shillings in September of the previous year for a shot of a traditional market scene in Boulogne. She goes on to write a regular column for Amateur Photographer throughout the 1930s.

In January 1935, Henry is appointed leader of a local sketching group by the Youth Hostel Association. In December 1935, she is commended for a sketch called River Pool, submitted to a competition judged by James Humbert Craig on behalf of the Youth Hostel Association, presented alongside Port Muckin a show with the sketching group. Maurice Canning Wilks contributes Skernaghan Point, Brown’s Bay to the same show.

The Robinson and Cleaver Art Gallery stages a display of works from Four Ulster Artists in 1936 consisting of paintings from Henry, her sister Marjorie, Theo Gracey and F. H. Hummel. She contributes Green Boat, which she had presented earlier in the year to the Ulster Academy of Arts, and includes Off the Scilly Isles among pictures from Brittany and Bavaria. The reviewer in Belfast’s News Letter refers to her style as “Post-Impressionism.”

In 1937, Henry is elected an Associate of the Ulster Academy of Arts and presents three watercolours to the institution the following year. The exhibition is opened by Oliver St. John Gogarty with participants such as John Luke, Maurice Wilks, James Humbert Craig, Rosamund Praeger and Colin Middleton, who shows three Surrealist works including Angelus.

The Royal Hibernian Academy displays two small works, Flight, 1941 and Lakeside, among an unusually large contingent of Ulster artists in the annual exhibition in the spring of 1942. The Ulster Academy of Arts is united in their commitment to raise funds for the bomb damaged Ulster Hospital for Children and Women in their Spring Exhibition of 1942. Henry displays a sense of humour in her use of black-out paint, roadblocks and air raid shelters in one of the watercolours on show.

Henry is a regular exhibitor with the Water Colour Society of Ireland, and contributes more than one hundred works to their exhibitions between 1943 and 1986.

Henry joins Violet McAdoo in a joint exhibition at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery in 1944. McAdoo presents with watercolours, however, Henry also presents oils. The paintings are primarily of landscapes but included a number urban scenes.

In 1945, Henry and her sister Margaret join Arthur and George Campbell, Colin Middleton, Gladys and Max Maccabe, Thomas Carr, Maurice Wilks, James McIntyre and others, in the only official exhibition from the Ulster branch of the Artists’ International Association sponsored by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (NI) at the Belfast Museum.

The MacGaffin Gallery at Pottinger’s Entry is the venue for a group exhibition of experimental and modernist works with Nevill Johnson, Aaron McAfee and the MacCabes in 1946, where Henry exhibits seven paintings. Quayside is one of three pictures that she presents at the Ulster Academy in 1946. She also shows it with the Water Colour Society of Ireland in the following year and at CEMA’s Some Ulster Paintings exhibition in that same year.

In 1946, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and Art (CEMA) purchases a painting by Henry, in addition to works by other contemporary Ulster artists. Twenty-four of the works from the CEMA collection, including her painting, are later presented at their Donegall Place gallery in 1954.

Henry debuts at the 1948 Irish Exhibition of Living Art with one painting and returns in each of the subsequent ten years with a total of 20 paintings. She is also elected as an Honorary Academician of the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1948.

Henry displays one work, Harbour, Northern Ireland, with Violet McAdoo at the 88th exhibition of the Society of Women Artists at the Royal Institute Galleries in London during the summer of 1949. Just a few months later her work is back in London for the United Society of Artists annual exhibition where she shows Gossip and Shell and Sail.

Henry is awarded a travel scholarship from the Soroptomists of Belgium in 1957, which enables her to study stained glass in the country. She is the President of Soroptomist Club of Belfast from 1960 to 1961, where she had been a member since its foundation in 1932.

Upon her return from Belgium, CEMA stages a solo exhibition with thirty-five of Henry’s oils and watercolours at their Belfast gallery. The exhibition is arranged at short notice when another is unexpectedly cancelled. Writer Nesca Robb opens the exhibition where it is claimed a new painting technique, “monopainting,” is revealed, described as paint drawn through a gauze over glass. The exhibition includes a ‘Breton’ series, Kerry Tangle, Ship Pattern, Barrack Shapes, Lough Shapes, and Backs. In addition, she displays In the Park, an oil previously seen at the Royal Ulster Academy in 1955 and at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1956, and a second oil, City Lunch Hour, exhibited at the Royal Ulster Academy in 1956.

The Ulster Society of Women Artists is founded in 1957 by Gladys Maccabe with the support of Henry and a number of others at a time when no arts societies are accepting female artists into their ranks. The main objective is to ensure the development of quality art and women artists in Ulster. The organisation begins with ten invited artists. Henry exhibits with the society throughout her life.

Henry receives a mention in the local press referring to her exhibits in the Royal Ulster Academy show of 1959 with Kenneth Jamison comparing her work with that of Deborah Brown, “Olive Henry is more decadent by instinct, a fine formaliser. Her pictures Man and Ropes and Riviera Port, well defined and carefully abstracted, contrast in form with Deborah Brown’s freer Oil Over Tempra,[sic] 1959.”

A group exhibition in 1964 at the New Gallery in Belfast includes work from Henry alongside Neil Shawcross, Max Maccabe, Kathleen Bell, Richard Croft and Helen Ross. Among other works she shows Easter and Long Garden.

In 1965, Henry joins twelve Ulster artists including Alice Berger-Hammerschlag, Basil Blackshaw, Colin Middleton, Romeo Toogood, and Mercy Hunter in a diverse exhibition of landscape paintings at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland gallery. In the same year, she completes a commission from the Sullivan Association of Former Pupils to design a window for Sullivan Upper School in Holywood, County Down.

In 1981, the Ulster Society of Womens Artists elects Henry as President. A retrospective of her studio works is hosted by the Shambles Gallery in Hillsborough, County Down in 1986, some thirty years since her last solo exhibition. Henry shows at the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition in 1987 for the last time.

Henry dies on November 8, 1989, at Crawfordsburn, County Down. Her paintings are held in the collections of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Ulster Museum, Irish Linen Centre & Lisburn Museum, and the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts Diploma Collection.

(Pictured: “The Gardener,” watercolour by Olive Henry)


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Death of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Novelist, Essayist & Screenwriter

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, Irish American novelist, essayist, short story writer and screenwriter, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, dies of a heart attack at the age of forty-four on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California.

Fitzgerald is born into an Irish Catholic middle-class family on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His mother, Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald, is of Irish descent and his father, Edward Fitzgerald, has Irish and English ancestry. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized. During his lifetime, he publishes four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he achieves temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, he receives critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

Fitzgerald is raised primarily in New York. He attends Princeton University but owing to a failed relationship with socialite Ginevra King and a preoccupation with writing, he drops out in 1917 to join the United States Army. While stationed in Alabama, he romances Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belongs to Montgomery‘s exclusive country-club set. Although she rejects Fitzgerald initially, because of his lack of financial prospects, she agrees to marry him after he publishes the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel becomes a cultural sensation and cements his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.

Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propels him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he writes numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s: The National Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, he frequents Europe, where he befriends modernist writers and artists of the “Lost Generation” expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), receives generally favorable reviews but is a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now widely praised, with some labeling it the “Great American Novel.” Following the deterioration of his wife’s mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, he completes his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).

Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald turns to Hollywood, writing and revising screenplays. While living in Hollywood, he cohabits with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attains sobriety only to die of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44. His friend Edmund Wilson completes and publishes an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald’s death.

At the time of his death, the Roman Catholic Church denies the family’s request that Fitzgerald, a non-practicing Catholic, be buried in the family plot in the Catholic St. Mary’s Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. He is buried instead with a simple Protestant service at Rockville Union Cemetery. When Zelda Fitzgerald dies in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in 1948, she is originally buried next to him at Rockville Union. In 1975, Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, successfully petitions to have the earlier decision revisited, and her parents’ remains are moved to the family plot in St. Mary’s Cemetery.


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Birth of Georgie Hyde-Lees Yeats, Wife of Poet W. B. Yeats

Georgie Hyde-Lees Yeats, the wife of the poet William Butler Yeats, is born Bertha Hyde-Lees in Fleet, Hart District, Hampshire, England, on October 16, 1892.

Hyde-Lees is the daughter of militia captain (William) Gilbert Hyde-Lees (1865–1909), of the Manchester Regiment, and Edith “Nelly” Ellen (1868–1942), daughter of barrister and manufacturer Montagu Woodmass, JP. Her father is regarded by her mother’s family as “a most undesirable character, but ‘rolling in money,'” having taken up the life of a “gentleman alcoholic” on resigning his commission after receiving an inheritance from his wealthy uncle Harold Lees, of Pickhill Hall, near Wrexham, then part of Denbighshire. He is “attractive, reckless, witty, and… musical,” and fond of pranks. She has an elder brother, Harold (1890–1963), who becomes a clergyman, with “rigid moral standards” and “a less than joyous existence,” his only indulgence being “a fine collection of drawings and etchings.” When she is only a few years old, her parents’ marriage fails due to her father’s alcoholism. Her father has enough income to support his family, allowing Georgie and her mother to spend “a good deal of their time” travelling in Europe, but his wife is in the awkward social position of being a “married woman without a husband.” The family lives a vaguely bohemian and nomadic lifestyle, travelling frequently to country homes and spending long periods visiting relatives.

Hyde-Lees attends a number of schools in Knightsbridge, London art schools, studies languages and classics, and piano. She becomes a close friend of Dorothy Shakespear, who is fond of Georgie and shares many of her interests despite being six years her senior. After the death of her father in 1909 at the age of 44, her mother marries Dorothy’s uncle, Henry Tucker, Olivia Shakespear‘s brother, and they move to Kensington.

Hyde-Lee’s mother often brings young musicians and artists she has recently met to Olivia Shakespear’s salon, many of whom become well-known modernists, including Ezra Pound, Walter Rummel, and Frederic Manning. She continues to make the rounds of country estates with her mother and Olivia and Dorothy Shakespear. It is in their company in 1910 or 1911, as a seventeen-year-old, that one morning she meets W. B. Yeats at the British Museum and again that afternoon during tea at the Shakespears.

Seven years later, when Hyde-Lees is 25 and Yeats is 52, he asks her to marry him. Only a few weeks earlier, Iseult Gonne, the daughter of Maud Gonne whom Yeats had loved for many years, had rejected his marriage proposal. She and Yeats marry just three weeks later, on October 20, 1917, in a public register office, witnessed by her mother and Ezra Pound. During the honeymoon, while Yeats is still brooding about Iseult’s rejection, she begins the automatic writing which fascinates him. Yeats writes about her psychography days later in what is to be A Vision (1925), and it holds the marriage together for many years. Within a year of marriage, Yeats declares her name of Georgie to be insufferable, and henceforth calls her George.

The couple has two children, Anne and Michael. Hyde-Lees Yeats dies on August 23, 1968, in Rathmines, County Dublin. She is buried at Drumcliff Churchyard, Drumcliff, County Sligo.


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First Exhibition of the Society of Dublin Painters

The first exhibition of the Society of Dublin Painters or Dublin Painters Group takes place at its premises at 7 St. Stephen’s Green on August 5, 1920. The Society is formed to promote Irish modern art.

The Society of Dublin Painters is founded in 1920 by Paul and Grace Henry, Mary Swanzy, Letitia Marion Hamilton, Jack B. Yeats, and Harry Clarke. As the original meeting notes have been lost, there is some uncertainty as to which artists are there at the inaugural meeting. Along with these potential founding members, Clare Marsh, E.M. O’Rorke Dickey, and James Sleator are featured in the first exhibition. The Society’s first exhibition runs until September 1 and attracts good reviews. Yeats, Marsh, and Paul Henry are all signatories to the lease of this premises. The group seeks to bring modernism to Ireland, and provide a freer, less academic space for artistic expression and experimentation less focused on accuracy and realism. Its foundation is seen as providing an alternative public exhibition space to the more conservative Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), which does not favour exhibiting Irish modern art. At its 1923 exhibition, Mary Swanzy exhibits one of her earliest cubist paintings, Decoration. The membership always has a large proportion of women.

The Society holds annual exhibitions and one-person shows at its premises on St. Stephen’s Green. Unlike the Royal Hibernian Academy, the Society does not mandate a particular style of painting for inclusion in its exhibitions, with the only limitation on the number of paintings an artist can submit. The members are free to submit paintings to other exhibitions such as the Royal Hibernian Academy, The White Stag Group and Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Membership is limited, with just ten members initially, rising to twelve in 1932, and eighteen in 1934 owing to limited exhibition and studio space. By 1943, the Society is being overtaken by exhibitions like the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and is no longer seen as the premier outlet for avant-garde Irish art. After a decline in membership, the Society ceases to exist by the early 1960s.

(Pictured: “The Post Car” by Jack B. Yeats displayed at the first exhibition, Adam’s Auctioneers of Dublin)


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Birth of Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, American novelist, essayist, short story and screenwriter, is born into an Irish Catholic family on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized. During his lifetime, he publishes four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he achieves temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, he receives critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

The son of middle-class Irish Catholics Edward and Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald is raised primarily in New York. He attends Princeton University but owing to a failed relationship with socialite Ginevra King and a preoccupation with writing, he drops out in 1917 to join the United States Army. While stationed in Alabama, he romances Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belongs to Montgomery‘s exclusive country-club set. Although she rejects Fitzgerald initially, because of his lack of financial prospects, she agrees to marry him after he publishes the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel becomes a cultural sensation and cements his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.

Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propels him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he writes numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s: The National Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, he frequents Europe, where he befriends modernist writers and artists of the “Lost Generation” expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), receives generally favorable reviews but is a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now widely praised, with some labeling it the “Great American Novel.” Following the deterioration of his wife’s mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, he completes his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).

Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald turns to Hollywood, writing and revising screenplays. While living in Hollywood, he cohabits with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attains sobriety only to die of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44. His friend Edmund Wilson completes and publishes an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald’s death.

At the time of his death, the Roman Catholic Church denies the family’s request that Fitzgerald, a non-practicing Catholic, be buried in the family plot in the Catholic St. Mary’s Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. He is buried instead with a simple Protestant service at Rockville Union Cemetery. When Zelda Fitzgerald dies in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in 1948, she is originally buried next to him at Rockville Union. In 1975, Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie successfully petitions to have the earlier decision revisited, and her parents’ remains are moved to the family plot in Saint Mary’s.


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Birth of Walter Beckett, Composer & Music Critic

Walter Beckett, Irish composer, teacher and music critic, is born on July 27, 1914 in Dublin. He is a cousin of the writer Samuel Beckett.

Beckett studies organ with George Hewson and harmony with John Francis Larchet at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM), in addition to music at Trinity College Dublin where he is conferred with a Mus.D. (Doctor of Music) in 1942. He lives from 1946 to 1963 in Venice, where he teaches English and piano. He also writes reviews from abroad for The Irish Times and makes a series of orchestral arrangements of Irish traditional music for Radio Éireann.

In addition to Beckett’s activity as a music critic for The Irish Times, he also writes biographical articles for dictionaries, in particular for the first edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. His books include studies on Franz Liszt and ballet music.

Beckett’s more ambitious musical works from the 1940s and 1950s are a Suite for Orchestra (1945), Four Higgins Songs (1946), The Falaingin Dances (1958) and a Suite of Planxties (1960) for harp and orchestra.

In 1963 Beckett moves to England, where he teaches music at various schools before returning to Ireland in 1970 to succeed A. J. Potter at the RIAM as professor of harmony and counterpoint. In the 1980s he produces a number of remarkable works such as Quartet for Strings (1980) and Dublin Symphony (1989) for narrator, chamber choir and large orchestra. While he is never a modernist, his later works nevertheless contain some advanced harmony, particularly in the quartet.

Beckett is forced to retire from the RIAM in 1985 after suffering a stroke. In 1986 he is elected a member of Aosdána and an Honorary Fellow of the RIAM in 1990. He dies in Dublin on April 3, 1996.


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Death of Artist Harry Aaron Kernoff

Harry Aaron Kernoff, Irish artist in oils and woodcuts, dies in Dublin on December 25, 1974. Of London/Russian extraction, he is primarily remembered for his sympathetic interest in Dublin and its people. He depicts street and pub scenes, as well as Dublin landmarks with sympathy and understanding. This is particularly evident in his woodcuts.

Born in London on January 10, 1900 to a Russian Jewish father and Spanish mother, Kernoff moves to Dublin in 1914 and becomes a leading figure in Irish modernism. While working as an apprentice in his father’s furniture business, which leads to his woodcuts, he takes night classes at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. There, in 1923, he wins the Taylor scholarship and goes on to exhibit at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) every year from 1926. He is elected RHA in 1936.

Influenced by Seán Keating, he paints the Irish landscape, genre scenes, and portraits. His work is part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam. In 1930, he visits the Soviet Union as part of an Irish delegation from the friends of Soviet Russia led by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. While visiting, he is influenced by the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia.

Kernoff is famously associated with Davy Byrne’s pub. His paintings and woodcuts of Davy Byrne’s pub are documents of his friendship with the original owner. While living in his adopted Dublin Jewish community he produces picture illustrations of his local scenes for a neighbourhood writer and friend, Nick Harris, for his book called Dublin’s Little Jerusalem.

Outside Kernoff’s home in Dublin, where he lives with two unmarried sisters, there is a long-standing sign in the front garden which says “Descendants of the Abravanels.” The Abravanel (or Abrabanel) family is one of the most famous Sephardic Jewish families in history, noted for their large quotas of rabbis, scholars, and members of a variety of scientific and artistic fields, dating from about the 13th century in Lisbon. The emergence of the famous philosopher and scholar Don Isaac Abravanel in the middle of the 16th century brings his works to greater universal recognition.

Kernoff spends the vast majority of his life unappreciated and makes little or nothing from his paintings until a few years before his death, when he begins to be appreciated by contemporary critics. He never marries.


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Birth of Jack Butler Yeats, Artist & Olympic Medalist

John “Jack” Butler Yeats, Irish artist and Olympic medalist, is born in London, England on August 29, 1871.

Yeats’s early style is that of an illustrator. He only begins to work regularly in oils in 1906. His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland, especially of his boyhood home of Sligo, County Sligo. His work contains elements of Romanticism.

Yeats is the youngest son of Irish portraitist John Butler Yeats and the brother of William Butler Yeats, the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient. He grows up in Sligo with his maternal grandparents, before returning to his parents’ home in London in 1887. Early in his career he works as an illustrator for magazines like The Boy’s Own Paper and Judy, draws comic strips, including the Sherlock Holmes parody “Chubb-Lock Homes” for Comic Cuts, and writes articles for Punch under the pseudonym “W. Bird.” In 1894 he marries Mary Cottenham, also a native of England and two years his senior and resides in Wicklow according to the 1911 Census of Ireland.

From around 1920, Yeats develops into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism. He is sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause, but not politically active. However, he believes that “a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints,” and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helps articulate a modern Dublin of the 20th century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man. Samuel Beckett writes that “Yeats is with the great of our time… because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence.” The Marxist art critic and author John Berger also pays tribute to Yeats from a very different perspective, praising the artist as a “great painter” with a “sense of the future, an awareness of the possibility of a world other than the one we know.”

Yeats’s favourite subjects included the Irish landscape, horses, circus and travelling players. His early paintings and drawings are distinguished by an energetic simplicity of line and colour, his later paintings by an extremely vigorous and experimental treatment of often thickly applied paint. He frequently abandons the brush altogether, applying paint in a variety of different ways, and is deeply interested in the expressive power of colour. Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the 20th century (and the first to sell for over £1m), he takes no pupils and allows no one to watch him work, so he remains a unique figure. The artist closest to him in style is his friend, the Austrian painter, Oskar Kokoschka.

Besides painting, Yeats has a significant interest in theatre and in literature. He is a close friend of Samuel Beckett. He designs sets for the Abbey Theatre, and three of his own plays are also produced there. He writes novels in a stream of consciousness style that James Joyce acknowledges, and also many essays. His literary works include The Careless Flower, The Amaranthers, Ah Well, A Romance in Perpetuity, And to You Also, and The Charmed Life. Yeats’s paintings usually bear poetic and evocative titles. Indeed, his father recognizes that Jack is a far better painter than he, and also believes that “someday I will be remembered as the father of a great poet, and the poet is Jack.” He is elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916. He dies in Dublin on March 28, 1957, and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.

Yeats holds the distinction of being Ireland’s first medalist at the Olympic Games in the wake of creation of the Irish Free State. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, his painting The Liffey Swim wins a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games. In the competition records the painting is simply entitled Swimming.

(Pictured: Photo of Jack Butler Yeats by Alice Boughton)


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Birth of Painter Harry Aaron Kernoff

harry-aaron-kernoffHarry Aaron Kernoff, Irish painter of London/Russian extraction, is born in London on January 10, 1900. He is primarily remembered for his sympathetic interest in Dublin and its people.

Kernoff’s family moves to Dublin when he is 14 years old where he ultimately becomes a leading figure in Irish modernism. He studies drawing and painting during night classes at the Metropolitan School of Art. In 1923, he wins the Taylor Scholarship and becomes a full-time art student. During his studies he meets and is encouraged by fellow artists Patrick Tuohy (1894-1930), Seán Keating (1889-1977), and Maurice MacGonigal (1900-79).

Influenced by Keating, he paints the Irish landscape, genre scenes, portraits, street and pub scenes, as well as Dublin landmarks with sympathy and understanding. This is particularly evident in his woodcuts. While living in his adopted Dublin Jewish community he produces picture illustrations of his local scenes for a neighbourhood writer and friend Nick Harris for his book entitled Dublin’s Little Jerusalem.

In 1930, Kernoff visits the Soviet Union as part of an Irish delegation from the friends of Soviet Russia led by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. While visiting, he is influenced by the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. He is famously associated with Davy Byrne’s pub. His paintings and woodcuts of Davy Byrne’s pub are documents of his friendship with the original owner.

Kernoff spends the vast majority of his life unappreciated, and makes little or nothing from his paintings until a few years before his death, when he begins to be appreciated by contemporary critics. He never marries.

Outside his home in Dublin, where he lives with two unmarried sisters, there is a long-standing sign in the front garden which says “… Descendants of the Abravanels…” The Abravanel (or Abrabanel) family is one of the most famous Sephardic Jewish families in history, noted for their large quotas of Rabbis, scholars, and members of a variety of scientific and artistic fields, dating from about the 13th century in Lisbon. The emergence of the famous philosopher and scholar Don Isaac Abravanel in the middle of the 16th century brings his works to greater universal recognition.

Kernoff dies in Dublin on December 25, 1974.

(Pictured: Portrait of Harry Aaron Kernoff, Oil on Canvas by John F. Kelly)


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Death of Artist Jack Butler Yeats

jack-butler-yeats

John “Jack” Butler Yeats, artist, Olympic medalist and brother of William Butler Yeats, dies in Dublin on March 28, 1957.

Butler’s early style is that of an illustrator. He only begins to work regularly in oils in 1906. His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland, especially of his boyhood home of Sligo. His work contains elements of Romanticism.

Yeats is born in London on August 29, 1871. He is the youngest son of Irish portraitist John Butler Yeats. He grows up in Sligo with his maternal grandparents, before returning to his parents’ home in London in 1887. Early in his career he works as an illustrator for magazines like The Boy’s Own Paper and Judy, draws comic strips, including the Sherlock Holmes parody “Chubb-Lock Homes” for Comic Cuts, and writes articles for Punch under the pseudonym “W. Bird.” In 1894 he marries Mary Cottenham, also a native of England and two years his senior and resides in Wicklow according to the Census of Ireland, 1911.

From around 1920, Yeats develops into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism. He is sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause, but not politically active. However, he believes that “a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints,” and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helps articulate a modern Dublin of the 20th century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man. Samuel Beckett writes that “Yeats is with the great of our time… because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence.” The Marxist art critic and author John Berger also pays tribute to Yeats from a very different perspective, praising the artist as a “great painter” with a “sense of the future, an awareness of the possibility of a world other than the one we know.”

Yeats’s favourite subjects include the Irish landscape, horses, circus and travelling players. His early paintings and drawings are distinguished by an energetic simplicity of line and colour, his later paintings by an extremely vigorous and experimental treatment of often thickly applied paint. He frequently abandons the brush altogether, applying paint in a variety of different ways, and is deeply interested in the expressive power of colour. Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the 20th century, he takes no pupils and allows no one to watch him work, so he remains a unique figure. The artist closest to him in style is his friend, the Austrian painter, Oskar Kokoschka.

Besides painting, Yeats has a significant interest in theatre and in literature. He is a close friend of Samuel Beckett. He designs sets for the Abbey Theatre, and three of his own plays are also produced there. He writes novels in a stream of consciousness style that James Joyce acknowledges, and also many essays. His literary works include The Careless Flower, The Amaranthers, Ah Well, A Romance in Perpetuity, And To You Also, and The Charmed Life. His paintings usually bear poetic and evocative titles. He is elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916.

Yeats holds the distinction of being Ireland’s first medalist at the Olympic Games in the wake of creation of the Irish Free State. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, his painting The Liffey Swim wins a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games. In the competition records the painting is simply entitled Swimming.

Yeats dies in Dublin on March 28, 1957, and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.