Most people know W.B. Yeats — the poet, the senator, the Nobel laureate. Fewer know his younger brother Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), who was, by many accounts, the more revolutionary artist of the two. He is widely regarded as Ireland's greatest painter.

Early life and the west of Ireland

Jack grew up partly in Sligo with his grandparents, a childhood that defined his artistic vision. The west of Ireland — its light, its people, its horses, its fairs and funerals — became his permanent subject matter. He drew for illustrated newspapers, worked as a cartoonist, and developed a sharp eye for the ordinary and the marginal: jockeys, circus performers, tinkers, fishermen.

His early work was illustrative and precise. But over decades, his style changed dramatically.

The turn to expressionism

By the 1930s and 1940s, Yeats had abandoned the careful realism of his early career for something far more radical. His late paintings are explosions of colour and impasto — thick, visible brushwork that makes the paint itself part of the image. Figures dissolve into light. The sea becomes molten. The ordinary becomes mythic.

Works like The Liffey Swim (1923) capture a specific moment with journalistic precision. Later paintings like Grief (1951) or The Singing Horseman are closer to interior states — memory, loss, joy — rendered in paint that seems barely contained by the canvas.

His politics

Yeats was a republican. He witnessed the 1916 Rising and its aftermath and was deeply affected by the Civil War. He never made explicitly political paintings, but the violence and division of early 20th-century Ireland runs beneath the surface of much of his mature work.

Samuel Beckett, who became a close friend, called him "the greatest living painter" in the 1930s — high praise from a man not given to hyperbole.

You can test your knowledge of Irish art — including works from Yeats's contemporaries — in our Ealaín game.