Lot 57 Jack Butler Yeats

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (1871-1957) THE SISTERS (1919) Oil on board, 9'' x 14'', (23cm x 35.5cm), signed. Exhibited: 1919 London International; 1920 Dublin; 1921 New York. Provenance: Sold through John Sloan to George Otis Hamlin, New York; Waddington Galleries London, bought by T.E. Waddington c.1965, Pymms Gallery, London, where acquired by the present owner. Two women with a donkey in the square of a Galway town, most probably Clifden, at the end of the day, when long shadows are cast on the ground. The closely worked grey and yellow of the street is counterbalanced by the warm brown/reds and grey in the rest of the painting. Yeats explained the picture in a note in the ''Lady of the House'' (op. cit.): ''The two sisters came into a town in western Galway every market day, with creels of fish carried on the back of a pleasant little ass. The ass gently munched his hay and dozed during the day. The sisters sat side by side and sold their shining fish to the townspeople. In fine, clear weather, or in drizzling sea fog, the sisters were always the last to leave the market. All day they seldom altered their position. But as the evening came on the younger sister would lean more affectionately against the elder, and just at the close of day first would go and get a cup of tea, then she would come back, and the other would go. Then the creels, with very few fish left in them, I hope, would be lifted again to the ass's back. And he and the two sisters would trudge away home.'' The picture accompanied Susan L. Mitchell's article of personal memories, ''An Irish Country Town''. Reference: Pyle, Hilary; Jack B. Yeats, a catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings, volume I, Andre Deutsch 1992.