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'Well, I'm sure the least
we can do, Mr Yeats,

is persuade you to talk
about your paintings.'

'I'm not so sure that you can.

'I'm not at all fond
of talking about my own

or other painter's work.

'I never lecture about painting. I
don't even interrupt at lectures.

'But I enjoy hearing
other people talk.'

(V/O) It was the landscape
that made the difference.

The high sky over Sligo.

The swirling clouds.

The shifting light
from the Atlantic.

Jack Butler Yeats, whether
he was in London, or in Devon,

or in Dublin, was passionately
engaged with Irish light.

And with the atmosphere created by
an Irish crowd.

He loved gatherings.

The fierce energy of spectators
at a sporting event

or the excitement
of the horse races.

But Jack Yeats
was not a simple man.

He was a mystery to his friends
and his family.

A solitary figure, often silent.

A watchful man.

As well as crowds,

he was fascinated by the lone
figure in the landscape.

He too, was a lone figure
in the landscape.

As a painter, he was not
a member of any school.

On his own, he discovered
a way to paint the light

and the landscape of his country.

Abandoning all caution,

like someone betting
every penny in his pocket

on a horse that lived
in his dreams.

This is the story
of Jack Butler Yeats.

The man who painted Ireland.

He was in a family
who were very brilliant.

And I can imagine
what it could be like.

They were really much more
extrovert than him.

Certainly, his brother
had been groomed as a poet

from the moment he was born,
practically.

Placing Jack Yeats is difficult
and he knew that.

There's a lovely thing he said

when he was recalling
his brother, WB,

the great poet, after he died.
He said they were chatting,

a couple of years before WB died
and his brother said,

they were talking
about somebody else,

how will he appear in history?

And Jack instantly said, "Men of
genius are not in history."

With William Yeats and Jack
Yeats, you have to be careful

and as subtle as can be,

because it's not just sibling
rivalry you're talking about.

It might seem like that because
their images are so different,

where WB Yeats
is so much a '90s poet.

He's got floppy hair,
he seems myopic,

he, sort of,
seems to talk in poetry.

Whereas Jack was mainly silent,
he dressed in a very plain way,

and it looks as though their
manners were entirely different.

But one of the things
they had in common

was an interest in transcendence.

(V/O) Although Jack put thought
into the titles of his paintings,

he never wanted to explain
what a painting meant.

That was not the question.

The question was,
what does a painting do?

He was not interested in just
making an image of a landscape,

as a photograph does.

His landscapes are mythical,
filled with shifting light

and shimmering colours.

We look at them with wonder.

The painter had not only captured
what Sligo looks like...

..but he has transformed it.

Jack Yeats,
born in London, in 1871,

might have lived all his life in
the shadow of his older brother,

the poet, William Butler Yeats.

From an early age, WB Yeats wrote
poems about Irish mythology

and unrequited love.

He was interested in theosophy
and magic.

He liked committees.

Jack, on the other hand,
loved the real world.

He had no interest in unrequited
love, he went his own way.

Jack was an independent spirit.

Jack Yeats is part of a family
of artists, not only the father,

a wonderful painter,
but his sisters, Lolly and Lily,

who were craft artists

and who worked at the Dun Emer
Press and the Cuala Press.

And of course,
his brother, the poet,

who was preoccupied
by visual art all his life,

wrote about it all his life.

So Jack Yeats grows up
in a family saturated in art,

and they're a family who disagree
violently about things.

And there's a wonderful
recollection of WB's,

where they have such a strong
argument, he and his father,

that his father,
though he later denied this,

breaks the glass
of a picture over WB's head.

And the two boys go to their room

and they hear the father
coming up the stairs,

and Jack says to his brother,
"Not a word till he apologises."

(V/O) As they grew older,
the two Yeats brothers

turned out to have much in common.

They both set out to enrich
Ireland with their art,

and to explore mysterious
regions of experience,

the soul, what memory means,

the power a single image
can have in a poem,

a play, a painting.

Jack Yeats took certain things
from his father, for example,

a belief somehow that your job
in the world is to live properly,

is to take advantage of life.

The word "life" meant
a great deal for both of them,

as did the word "art".
But that's as far as it went.

The father was indolent,
he didn't finish things.

Jack Yeats was a great finisher.

The father didn't do commercial
art because he thought,

you know, it was beneath him.

It was never beneath Jack
to make a living.

It's a common thing,
I mean, in other words,

the son becomes
the opposite to the father.

I think it's very,
very difficult for us

to get any full picture
of the relationship

between the Yeats' children
and their mother,

because we don't really
have any correspondence.

When Jack made his first money
as an illustrator,

the first thing
he did with the money

was he paid for medical bills
for his mother.

In other words, we have one clue
that at least he cared for her

as she was ailing and sick.

It's very difficult to get
a bigger picture than that,

other than, of course,
she was a Pollexfen

and he was more
a Pollexfen than a Yeats.

In other words,
they gave him Sligo.

(V/O) John Butler Yeats,
Jack's father,

had come to London
to seek fame as a painter,

but he could not make a living.

This meant that Jack
spent much of his childhood

with his mother's family,
the Pollexfens, in Sligo.

He was brought up,
in his formative years,

away from the family.

They, Susan, would have been very
happy to have had Jack in Sligo

because she missed Sligo so much.

In a way, you'd wonder
why she didn't go back

and live there with him.

But they may have done it because
Susan was not very strong.

It was getting difficult
for the family.

She hadn't very good health.

This is the 1870s, 1880s,
this is the Victorian period,

children are sent routinely
away from their families.

Mrs Yeats' family,
the Pollexfens,

are well-off Sligo merchants.

We might think it odd
that Jack is packed off,

when he's quite young,
to live with his grandparents,

but it's not that unusual.

And he's sent to Sligo,
which is ravishingly beautiful,

which has the most extraordinary
watery Atlantic light,

and this affects and implicates
Jack's work from then on.

And much of his late work,
I think, is a flashback

to what he saw and absorbed
in Sligo, which he adored.

(V/O) What Jack saw in Sligo
changed his life.

The play of light
over the Atlantic.

How colours shifted as the clouds
gathered and were swept away.

This was an Ireland that
had appeared in illustrations

and been told in stories.

But, in all its wildness...

..it had not been
captured in paint.

I think that Jack Yeats,
as he developed

and evolved as an artist,

certainly was revolutionary
within the genre of Irish art.

He broke ranks with everybody
that was out there.

And he strove to share
and portray

the basic sentiments of humankind
through his paintings.

Yeats was always interested in
this idea of constant change

and movement and that's what
he sees manifest in nature.

So, light is always changing,

especially
in the west of Ireland.

Certain colours are exaggerated,

you know, there'd be flecks
of yellows and pinks and reds

on parts of his paintings,
because that is the direction

that the light
is hitting them on.

And it distorts the form
and it distorts the colour,

but at the same time, it gives us
clues as to what these forms are

and how they relate
to each other.

Look at this painting
Jack made in 1946.

It is called Mountain Window.

Look first
at the draftsman's skill.

Look at the yellow as it hits
the outline of the window,

making it seem luminous,
lit like something in a dream.

The painting is dominated
by the molten light that comes

from a dream version of the sun,
or the moon, over Ben Bulben.

Some shapes are exact
and carefully delineated.

The curtains and the foliage
make this a real room.

Looking onto a scene that has
been transformed by the painter

into something
that transcends memory.

A landscape of the soul.

And my passion for the work of
Jack Yeats stems from that room.

That room,
in the National Gallery,

where it was just his work.

And the miracle of painting
is how much of the shape

do you create
and how many points of reference

do you put into it?

You know there is intention
for something else to be there,

it's either a landscape or death
or a horse, a lot of the time.

I'm looking at the painting and
going, "Is there a horse there?

Is there not a horse there?"

But there is something
that is there.

And the amount
of information you give,

how that goes from your brain,
saying, "I'm thinking of a horse,

but all I have to do is that.
That'll be fine. That's enough.

That's enough.
That's enough. Horse."

That to me, is a miracle.

Yeats was a great documentarian
of everyday life.

He had a fascination, it seems,
with so many different parts

of normal life
that were perhaps overlooked

or ignored by other people
or other artists.

He saw the magic or the wonder,
or the heroic even,

in everyday scenes,

not just in, the kind of, heroic
deeds of the revolutionaries,

but in what actually happened
on the street

and how the people
of Dublin lived through it.

We all, kind of,
regard ourselves as observers.

What we're doing is we're inside,
but we're, kind of,

giving ourselves
the right to step out

and talk about
what we've just seen.

But you need to have,
kind of, a toe outside.

It's one of the reasons
it's useful to come to the UK,

like I did, as an Irish person
and be the intelligent alien,

going, "I'm not from here but
I've noticed this about you",

and that may have been
a thing that he was able to do

from going forward and back,
to step into Ireland for a while,

to see it with different eyes
and step away again.

The Yeatses lived
in Bedford Park,

a London suburb, Chiswick suburb,

which had become a kind of
artists' colony.

The houses were cheap,
though very attractive.

There were gardens,
there was a local theatre,

there was a pub
where they all met.

And it can't be underestimated,
I think,

how much this meant for all
the children in the family.

The girls worked with
the William Morris workshops

and learned a lot of their
marvellous crafts of embroidery,

and bookbinding
and so forth, there.

Willy met publishers,
fellow poets.

GK Chesterton was a neighbour
and Jack absorbed this as well.

At the age of 16, Jack went
to art school in London.

But he was much too interested
in the world outside

to be a brilliant student.

He was already making drawings
and illustrations,

taking commissions
where he could find them.

Jack worked diligently as an
illustrator and a cartoonist,

and a caricaturist
in these London years.

He was not a painter yet.

That would not happen
until he returned

to live in Ireland for good.

So Jack is picking up
both artistic impressions

and artistic influences
from what's around him.

But also he's observing,
he's a flaneur,

he walks the streets
and takes notes.

He's doing that in London
when he's young

and when he's doing drawings
for Punch magazine,

under the name of Bird,
which was a pseudonym.

But he's doing it later when he's
a much more established painter,

and he's painting the great
scenes that will emerge,

especially in his paintings at
the time of the Irish Revolution.

These wonderful paintings of
Dublin life at a moment of crisis

relate directly back to the way
that he has always sketched

what goes on around him
and absorbed it

with this deft, ironic,
slightly zany approach.

He was born in London,
went back over to Sligo...

..to be raised
by his grandparents,

then came back and lived
with the family in Chiswick,

then moved to Devon and visited
Ireland during the summer.

So there's a kind of, not a
question mark of his Irishness,

in any kind of way that he has
to prove anything about this.

But it's interesting, given that
he was here and raised here

for large parts of his life,
that the Irish landscape

was the one
that was more interesting,

that he didn't chronicle Britain
at all.

That all of his work
was about Ireland,

like, that had that huge capture
of his imagination.

At Bedford Park in London,
where the Yeats family lived,

exile seemed to intensify
their interest in Ireland.

Ireland was becoming a cauldron
of change and possibility,

that was not only political,
but artistic.

In his own poems, William invoked
the same Sligo landscape

that fascinated Jack.

Finding images that would
capture a changing Ireland

and creating new images to replace
or intensify old myths.

Slowly, Jack Yeats,
whose destiny might have been

to spend his life in England,
was enticed into this new realm.

Into a new way of seeing
and imagining Ireland.

If you ask Jack Yeats what he
learned from, as a painter,

he would probably have said
he learned from life.

When Lady Gregory takes up
the Yeatses, first WB,

then the whole family, she
decrees, in her seigniorial way,

that Jack must go to Paris.

But he didn't and he knew
he didn't want to.

He is unpretentious
throughout his life.

And I think he's very conscious
of his own abilities,

he has no false pride about that,

but where he's learning from
is what he sees.

Living is itself
almost an art form,

and that's what he learns from,
groundedness,

in learning from
the occupation of living.

In the 1890s, in his 20s,

Jack let his family know
that he had met

the woman he intended to marry.

Her name was Mary Cottenham White,
she was known as Cottie.

She became his lifelong companion.

In Devon, they settled into
a stable, domestic existence.

While he'd found a tranquillity,
Ireland was stirring in him.

Part of what's happening at the
time of the Celtic Revival,

which is segwaying into what we
see as the long Irish Revolution,

is a search for authenticity.

I think for artists
like the Yeatses,

their careers are, in a sense,
formed in London,

but to get back to Ireland

is to have access
to a kind of authenticity.

In the summer of 1888, his trip
to Sligo was filled with activity.

The Ireland that appears
in his work from these years

is affectionate
and perfect in its way,

but it could have been made
by an outsider.

As Jack was
making clear from this work,

that Jack Yeats
had not yet come home.

The centenary of 1798,
the 1798 Rising,

the centenary of that in 1898
was enormously important

for the radicalisation
of Irish nationalism.

It gave a, kind of, shot in the
arm to revived Fenianism.

It was very important
for WB Yeats,

who was much involved in the
Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee

and was at his most Fenian stage
himself at that time.

For Jack, it was the experience

of the Bartholomew
Teeling Memorial,

who was one of the 1798 martyrs.

It was the experience of his
memorial that really, I think,

begins his interest in a,
kind of, Irish national history.

Thus, in the summer of 1898,
on a trip to Ireland...

..Jack Yeats underwent
a great change.

This was a new, emerging Ireland.

You know, one thing he said in
his manifesto and elsewhere,

he always says, "The best artist
paints what he loves."

And he loves his country,
too, you know.

So when he lived in Devon, he was
very much away from Ireland,

but he was conscious
of his love of Ireland

and how much it meant to him.

So, when he came back,
the first decade of the century,

there was this great buzz.

Things were changing so much...

..and he involved himself

in the preparation
for Ireland being free

because home rule
had been promised.

In the National Archives
in Dublin,

there is the 1911 census entry for
Jack Yeats and his wife, Cottie,

who are living now in Greystones,
County Wicklow,

having left Devon in 1910.

We can see Jack's
customary signature.

He has come home.

Jack entered the Gaelic
revival movement

his brother was engaged in,

a tradition that rejoiced in its
own language, its books and plays.

He was ready to capture the life
from which it emanated,

the love of poetry, of legend,
of idiosyncratic character.

Free to become the artist
he wants to be.

It's interesting how much that
he would have been swept up

by the explosion of culture and
nationalism around that time.

It probably would have been
impossible not to. What I feel,

I'm probably more telling you,
is his literary connections.

The easiest parallel to draw
is actually with Joyce,

because Joyce is like,
his idea of Dublin is

a series of vignettes
of emotional moments

in ordinary life, which is
exactly what he was doing

as an illustrator for the first
30-40 years of his career,

and then Joyce became
increasingly abstract.

And that same movement occurred,

which is, you chronicle,
you learn your skills,

and then,
once you've mastered that,

that allows you then the freedom,

as he said himself, Yeats said,
"To drop the line."

The change, when Jack returned
to live in Ireland,

was not just in the extent
of his ambition.

Ireland too, was going through
a transformation.

We can see this struggle
in the work Jack did

for a study by George A Birmingham
of 12 different Irish types

in 1913, entitled Irishmen All.

These are people,
rather than abstract creations.

The figures here are alive.

Jack is as concerned with their
humanity, their singleness,

as he is with them as typical
citizens of a changing Ireland.

Yet, as Europe prepared for war
and Ireland for insurrection,

a battle was raging
in Jack's imagination...

..between the illustrator
he had been

and the artist he would become.

He's,
as I keep explaining to people,

he was evolving all the time.

His art was evolving
all the time.

And he never intended
to be a revolutionary,

or he never intended to be an
expressionist, for that matter.

It grew on him and he naturally
evolved into what he was doing.

He's an evolutionary.

'What would you say to me now if
I tell you that there are

several of your paintings
that I just don't understand?'

'The answer to that question
could only be completely answered

in a lecture, I've said
that I don't lecture.

'But I would say you could not
possibly understand

all of any painting of mine,

any more than you could understand

all of the feelings
of any living being.

'And there's no book of words,

no direction that you

or anyone else can understand
all about painting.

'I dislike the word art
as to painting.

'There is only one art
and that is the art of living.

'Painting is an occupation
within that art

and that occupation is the freest
of all the occupations of living.

'There is no alphabet,
no grammar, no rules whatever.

'It is carried out
in the face of the enemy.'

Undoubtedly,
Yeats' art is evocative.

As I said earlier,
it captures an emotion.

To me, a lot of the scenes,
the attribution of emotion,

be it fear, hate, love, death,

Jack Yeats makes you
question yourself

as you look into his paintings,

makes you mentally explore what
he's trying to portray to you,

and how he's trying
to portray it.

Jack found that his memory
was so powerful

that he did not need
to get wet to paint water,

or to stand in the landscape
to paint the horizon.

He could create the excitement
of what he saw in the studio

when he was alone.

But it was not just
that he remembered,

he travelled with a sketchbook
to set the spark.

Jack lived with a store of images

and from these,
he could imagine scenes.

And these scenes in all their
drama came to him powerfully,

forcefully, until he could make
from them images that were fresh

and real and true.

Bachelor's Walk, In Memory is
a powerful and important painting

and it epitomises a moment
when everything changed.

In April 1914, guns were landed
at Larne in County Antrim

for possible use in defending
Ulster from home rule.

Government turned
a blind eye to that,

didn't turn a blind eye
to what happened in Howth

when guns were run in and
in a fracas on Bachelor's Walk,

the Scottish Borderers shot into
a crowd of demonstrators,

killing people.

Jack Yeats, his sketchbooks show
how closely he followed this,

he walked the streets
in the days afterwards,

he took a very careful drawing
of a place on the quays

where a cross had been
chalked on the wall

to memorialise
those who had been killed.

The painting isn't
of that particular corner,

but it shows that
he was looking at the memorial

that this incident had set up.

The painting itself, it's a very
beautiful image of a young girl,

rather a Kathleen Ni Houlihan
figure, I think,

representing Ireland,
laying a flower on a ledge

and in an almost
religious gesture.

Jack did not seek to capture
the shooting, the panic,

the army versus the crowd,
the immediacy.

Visiting the scene,

he noticed that people had left
roses where the dead had fallen.

Thus becoming the image
he wanted to work with,

one of dignified remembrance
and stillness.

A young woman leaving a flower
in memory of the dead.

Yeah, memory, it was hugely
important...hugely important

to Yeats and to his work as well,

as a theme, as a source
of subject matter,

as a way of thinking
about the world, I guess.

And what was left behind was
flowers scattered on the ground

and a memory in the space
or in the environment,

of the violent episode
that had taken place there.

She is, you know,
just a wonderful figure,

expressing this idea
of mourning and loss.

And he imagines this, he didn't
see this particular event,

he has imagined this
and then he goes back,

probably the following year,
to make that painting

when he, sort of, digested, if
you like, that particular moment.

The painting is a depiction
of the power of aftermath.

If this is Jack's first
openly political painting,

it is created
with subtlety and care.

She also symbolises feeling
and memory in Ireland in 1915,

a time when Jack's interest
in crowds and gatherings...

..is becoming more sombre,
more complex.

On Easter Monday, 1916,

Irish rebel leaders
launched an armed revolt

against British rule in Ireland.

The British military response
was swift and devastating.

Dublin streets
were left in ruin.

The events would become a tipping
point for Ireland's revolution

and the war for independence
that would follow.

I think we have to look at the
1916 Rebellion very carefully

because later on,
it was seen as heroic.

But all we have to do is imagine

that the city of Dublin
was being bombed to bits

and that the leaders are going
to be executed one-by-one

over a period of,
say, two weeks.

It was not merely that a group of
thugs had taken over the city,

or a group of die-hards
that no-one knew,

these were well-known figures
in the city.

And Jack Yeats, at this point,
is back living in Ireland

and suddenly, the world crumbles.

For us, at 100 years or more
removed, it's almost unthinkable

like, what the
1916 Rising was like

for those who lived
to see the city destroyed,

to see the instigators
of the Rising, you know,

executed so publicly
and so shockingly.

I think, for Jack, that certainly
didn't aid his recovery.

In the years after
the 1916 Rebellion,

Jack Yeats suffered from
depression and uncertainty.

What has come to him with so much
hope, the idea of a new Ireland,

had resulted in the death of
civilians in Dublin city centre

and the execution of the leaders
of the rebellion.

In the words
of William Butler Yeats,

"What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night, but death.

Was it needless death
after all?"

Jack too, did not find stability
when he came back to Ireland.

Instead of race meetings
and big gatherings,

it was forced by events that
haunted the public imagination,

to become a documentarian
in Ireland,

making iconic paintings of the
Irish revolutionary period.

Such as
The Funeral Of Harry Boland

and the stark
and haunting painting,

Communicating With Prisoners.

Politically, I think he has been,
as so many people were,

deeply saddened and disillusioned
by the Civil War.

He doesn't approve of the treaty,
unlike his brother,

who is a very strong supporter of
it and his sisters too actually.

The events of the war
and of the Civil War,

affect him deeply, that's clear
from the way he painted them.

But his style is also changing

and a painting
that epitomises this is

the marvellous, fluid painting,
The Liffey Swim of 1923.

So, one of the things
that I find fascinating

about the progression
of Yeats' style and technique

was that it changed so
dramatically later in his life.

The Liffey Swim is often talked
about in terms of an early phase

of his oil painting career but
he was actually in his early 50s

when he made that painting.

It's often used as a painting
to show this move away

from illustration,
flat colours, line,

towards a more fluid,
expressive technique.

And that was what he did.
He suddenly found that his brush,

it didn't want to be surrounded
with an outline.

You can just see this happening

because you can actually
see the line

and then you can see
where he's left the line out.

But you see his brushwork
almost coming out at you.

Early in the life
of the new state,

he made an iconic image
of Dublin,

not only at peace but at play.

In this painting, he could not
only explore the atmosphere

in the new state but experiment
with colour and form.

Jack began to think about Irish
light and the Irish sky.

Jack's project
was to make paintings

that do not strive
for perfection...

..but for something
that matches the excitement

that he himself took from life.

Jack Yeats, for me, the most
exciting thing about him,

is that he settled on his style
when he was 54 years old,

which if you like,
I work in a populist art form,

I'd be delighted to think
in five years, I'm 49,

in five years' time, I'm suddenly
going to go Expressionist.

That would be amazing if that
was my journey as well.

Suddenly at that age I realise,
"I've learned how to do this,

I don't need the crowds any more.

I don't need to worry
about DVD sales.

I'm going to make a series of
vague pieces that people can draw

their own interpretation on."

That would be a lovely way
to see out your 70s.

What Jack Yeats is doing
in the '30s is, I think,

very interesting,
not only in terms of the way

his painting is getting,
some would say wilder,

certainly more Expressionist but
also, he's beginning to write.

He's writing plays,
he's writing novels,

they're very surreal,
adventurous.

They're very niche,
they don't sell a lot,

the plays
are occasionally put on,

but only
in a very experimental way.

But it's of a peace,
I think, with the way

that his painting itself is, if
you can use the word, literary.

The people who start following
his work very passionately

and indeed buying it, notably
are often writers themselves.

Ernie O'Malley,
who wrote the great books

about the Irish Revolution,
On Another Man's Wound,

and The Singing Flame, also very
famously, slightly later,

Samuel Beckett becomes heavily
preoccupied by Yeats' paintings

and intuits in them a,
kind of, breaking of barriers.

In the 1930s, Jack became more
adventurous in his use of colour

and more ambitious
in the panoramas he created.

Now, the scene he saw,
or remembered,

was no longer the focus
of the painting.

Rather, it was his own emotion

that gave the painting
its immediacy.

At the very centre of his work
was the power to transform.

Now we have Lot 35.

Fantastic work by Jack Butler
Yeats, Death For Only One.

Yes, I have a bid of 300,000
here on the book at 300,

320, 340, 380 with him. 400.

I may break up in this one
but, er...

(CLEARS THROAT)

..the painting, Death For
Only One, is clearly about

two people who have been friends.

And, er...

At this time in my life,
having been...

..married for 48 years.

(SNIFFS)

I just can't look
at the painting.

In 2019, an auction
took place in Dublin...

..where a collection
of Jack Butler Yeats' paintings,

once owned by Irish revolutionary,
Ernie O'Malley,

sold for record-breaking figures.

Becoming a landmark moment
for Irish art.

I first saw Death For Only One

in Cormac's house
in Stonington, Connecticut,

and it was a good few years ago,

and I was very taken
by the painting

and it was his favourite painting
at that time.

And I suppose in a way, it
related, to a certain extent,

to his own father's death,
mainly because of the injuries

he suffered during
the War of Independence,

which left him very unhealthy.

But when I went to see him,

when we were discussing selling
the collection in Dublin,

he had taken it down
off the wall.

A lot of himself in that picture,
in a way and it really related,

I think, to two deaths in his
family, his father and his wife.

Death For Only One could be
interpreted in many ways.

I see it as just
a human experience,

but you can interpret that also
in a nationalist sense.

You know, the past is gone
and the future is ahead.

When you talk about
the particular sale,

the O'Malley sale...

..I think what I was first drawn
to was the name of the painting.

I mean, Death For Only One,

I mean,
what does that portray to you?

What was the emotion
that it was capturing?

And it totally intrigued me.

Two...tramps, one dead,

the other standing
over the corpse in a bog.

Why was that not in a room?
Why was it in a bog?

Was the immenseness of the bog

another way
of expressing eternity?

It may, perversely,
even capture joy

if we believed that the corpse
has gone to a better place.

This is not a history painting.

It is not a depiction
of something exact

that happened in the Irish past.

Jack did not try
to explain the world,

but instead sought to enrich
our sense of its mystery.

He painted so that the world
could surprise him.

Beckett loved Yeats, not for what
he did with the light of Sligo,

but for the light of eternity.

His figures took on an aspect
that was almost religious,

certainly spiritual
but he offered no easy comfort.

They were alone.

In 1945, in a book review,
Samuel Beckett wrote of Yeats...

"He is with the great of our time
because he brings light,

as only the great
dare bring light,

to the issueless predicament
of existence."

In 1939, William Butler Yeats
died in France.

In his late poems,
he was defiant against old age,

or any easy acceptance
of decrepitude and death.

Even though he had lived most
of his life in Dublin and London,

he wrote, "In a sense,
Sligo has always been my home."

When he wanted to evoke
a sense of freedom

and energy in his poem,
The Tower, he remembered Sligo.

"Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical

Imagination, nor an ear and eye

That more expected the impossible

No, not in boyhood
when with rod and fly,

Or the humbler worm,
I climbed Ben Bulben's back

And had the livelong
summer day to spend."

In the latter years of WB's life,

when he's living
in Rathfarnham in the 1930s,

there is quite a bit of coming
and going with Jack.

They go on walks together,
they visit, they talk.

So they are closer
at the end, in a sense,

than they were at the beginning.

When WB dies, in the South
of France, in January 1939,

it's Jack who comes to tell the
sisters that it's happened.

There's a wonderful description
in one of Lily's letters,

where she says, "He said nothing,

he just threw his arm up
in the air in a gesture,

as if to say, 'Gone'."

Both Yeats brothers
were enchanted by Sligo,

as though it were a form of magic.

The same Ben Bulben
haunted William

that would haunt
the paintings of Jack.

They both carried with them
images of that sky

and the life lived
on the edge of the Atlantic.

In their imaginations,
nothing ever replaced it.

I think it's possible to ask any
artist, including any writer,

"What is it you've lost?"

That a lot of people
work out of loss.

Even a house that's not
there any more,

someone who's not there any more

or an atmosphere
that's not there any more.

And in the experience of
Jack Yeats, he began to imagine

that very idea that this could
disappear, this could be wiped.

The sense of the paint sometimes
as so sketchily placed on,

or so wet, that in a second it
could be scraped or wiped off,

that it's just caught,
it's not pure and whole.

It's impure and tentative.

I will paint impurity because the
pure would be too easy to make.

Jack Yeats' marriage was, I
think, very central to his life

and to the stability of his life.

And she was an artist too,
of course,

and worked for Dun Emer
and Cuala.

But it was one of those,
I think, very interdependent,

close, childless marriages,

which left Jack, obviously,
bereft when she died.

And there are some great
paintings, which are very much,

I think, painted in the wake
of her illness and death.

He then goes to live
in the Portobello nursing home

for the last few years
of his life,

while at the same time
his artistic imagination,

and he paints
right on into his 80s,

is in some ways never more
flaring and explosive and jolting

than in these last years and
these last paintings, which have,

as I say, to do with, I think,

a visionary sense
of something to come.

In this time between his wife,
Cottie's death,

and his own death in 1957...

..he allowed for the possibility
of transcendence,

letting blues and indigos make
the skies and landscape appear

like colours from a vivid dream.

The composition of this great
painting shows real daring.

A, sort of, carefree response
to structure and tone.

An insistence that it is not
the task of the painter

to obey any rules or reflect
what is merely visible.

Instead, it is the task of the
painter to see beyond reality

and beyond dreams,
towards a pictorial space

that is alive with paint,

that pulls our eye
in towards the lone figure,

offering a sense
of the human dilemma.

A wildness
that unsettles the self.

'I'd like to bring it back
to painting again and ask you

if you have any advice
to offer to a young painter?'

'No, there is no advice
I could give.

'I gave up
giving advice years ago.

'I never found it a success.

'But if any teacher-minded painter
felt like giving advice,

he might suggest
to the young painter

not to swallow any advice without
rolling it over in his own mouth,

and then telling himself
that it was his own idea.

'After that, when he faces
his canvas to begin painting,

he will have no third party
opinions to consider,

not even the opinions of an
imaginary friend or foe,

who is to view his picture
when it's finished.

'They will then be just the two of
them, his painting and himself.

'If this sounds like advice,

then remember,
it is subject to revision,

and when I am 12 hours older,
I might like to change it.'

(V/O) Jack's journey
was not towards wisdom.

In his interview
with Eamonn Andrews,

he spoke about the art that
mattered as the art of life.

This was what his father
had said, too.

It was life that mattered.

Alone in the studio, he discovered
that he would never know

what life was or what it meant.

To know it,
would be to simplify it.

Painting what he did not know
would do more, mean more,

than trying to fix the world
in an image,

pin it down,
take the mystery out of it.

The art of living was the art of
exploration, of setting out,

moving west, under the high
and shifting sky.

That is what Jack did
for as long as he could

in his studio in Dublin.

That is what he gave to the world.

The art of not arriving, but the
sheer excitement of setting out,

going on,
the freedom of seeing the world

as no-one else had ever done.

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