+ Expand
Dimensions: 46 by 61cm., 18 by 24in.
+ Expand
Provenance: PROPERTY OF A DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN COLLECTOR
Sold by the Artist to Leo Smith, January 1948
Michael J. Doran, Davy Byrne's, Dublin
Dillon Antiques, Dublin, whence purchased by the present owner, 1986
+ Expand
Exhibited: Leeds, Temple Newsam House, toured by the Arts Council to Aberdeen, City Art Gallery, Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, and London, Tate Gallery, Jack B. Yeats, Loan Exhibition, 1948, no.75;
Boston, McMullen Museum of Art (formerly Boston College Museum of Art), and toured to Dublin, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 1996, and then Yale, Center for British Art, 1997-8, America's Eye, no.43, illustrated in colour in the catalogue;
Washington D.C., The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Millenium Celebrations, Island: Arts from Ireland, 2000, unnumbered, illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
+ Expand
Literature: Hilary Pyle, Jack. B.Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, André Deutsch, London, 1992, p.795, no.879.
+ Expand
Notes: Painted in 1947, On To Glory went on lengthy tour the year immediately after completion. First seen at the one-man show held at Temple Newsam House just outside Leeds, the picture then went on with the major Retrospective toured by the Arts Council to Aberdeen Art Gallery, the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and, most significantly, the Tate Gallery in London. It had been just six years since Yeats' first ever show in London, jointly with William Nicholson at the National Gallery in 1942. The following year witnessed the beginning of the crucial professional relationship with Victor Waddington, who did much to construct an international stage upon which Yeats might stand, leading to the artist's emancipation from his customary status as 'the poet's brother'. (Beckett was to write in his 1954 Homage to Jack B. Yeats that "the artist who stakes his being comes from nowhere. And he has no brothers".) 1945 saw record attendance at Dublin's major National Loan retrospective. In his appreciation of the earlier National Gallery show, the critic Herbert Read drew flattering parallels with Delacroix, Roualt and Kokoschka. (Kokoschka himself reflected in Yeats in the 1960s as "an outsider who did not follow or belong to any school. All his work bears the mark of fantastic imagination and individuality". Asked what he viewed as Yeats' best period, with touching simplicity and sincerity the Austrain expressionist replied: "As long as he was alive".) By 1947 Jack B. Yeats had indeed 'arrived' and On To Glory embodies this success.
Much has been written of Yeats' supreme affection for horses. His empathy with them to some degree even transcended that which the quiet, and in later years reclusive, artist enjoyed with his fellow men. (Yeats was unassuming to the degree that even at the height of his fame he would enjoy queuing in line for his own shows, scarcely believing, and deriving simple pleasure from, the fact that the interest was in his own work.) It was thus most frequently in his pictures that the ebullience of the man appeared released, and arguably in his horse pictures beyond all others, memorably seen for example in The Wild Ones (sold in these rooms, 21st May 1999, lot 331). One sees here visual articulation of his belief that "pictures are not the outcome of science, they come from Life itself... I want to do away altogether with the idea that the enjoyment of pictures comes from the pleasure in the understanding of a science. Pictures are a part of the life of us all, and the way to enjoy pictures and life is the same" (Yeats, 1922, quoted by the artist Stephen McKenna in his catalogue to The Pursuit of Painting, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, with Lund Humphries, London, 1997, p.24). Yeats' approach was in this respect instinctive, passionate and expressive, his work a visual conjuring of unspecific 'glory'. Yet while Yeats consistently resisted any attempt to subject his pictures to analysis, narrative remained an important thread throughout his work and On To Glory exhibits favourite themes to which he returned more than once.
Hilary Pyle gives a lyrical description of the scene: 'A child with a cocked hat walks along a path in a field towards a distant gate, waving a bridle in the air. A beautiful chestnut pony, with dark mane and tail and a white star on its forehead, turns its head round to look at him. The sparkling landscape, with a hovering grey cloud in the light sky, the idealised youth (as a symbolic figure) and the beautiful animal with whom he is complete empathy, reinforce the lofty notion expressed in the title' (op.cit.). The horse dominates the canvas. The massive haunches, a glossy tail caressing his hocks, match the sturdy shoulders and noble neck, head gently lowered to acknowledge the passing boy. The rich swipes of wet paint sweep around the barrel of the powerful chest and globular snakes of contrasting mane tumble forward as the animal flares his indigo nostrils. He exudes an air of latent strength and presence despite the stationary pose, underlined by the contrast with the skipping unconcern of the small tow-headed child who kicks his way through the lush green meadow.
Yeats frequently juxtaposes youth and age in the manner of the earliest medieval moralists, and the present work bears close comparison with Age of 1943 (fig.1, sold in these rooms, 29th November 2001, lot 32). In both paintings a young child appears alongside a stately, mature horse, amidst a glowing Western landscape. Age was however painted during the Second World War and its offer of hope is mediated through this context, while no such qualifying restraints appear evident in On To Glory. It would seem likely that the present work was painted prior to the death of Cottie, the artist's much-loved wife, in April of 1947, as the spirit of the piece is unashamedly joyous, underpinned by a sense of the horse's ease and contentment. It is believed that Yeats produced very little work in the months immediately following his loss. However, it is not inconceivable though that the artist should have found consolation in his work, as he returned to and was absorbed by his canvases later in the year, and that the title might reflect his hopes for his wife's deserved rewards.
On To Glory and Age diverge in another respect - the landscape here is more fully worked and is dedicated a greater degree of the picture space than in Age. Given the absorbing narratives to be consistently picked out even in Yeats' more fluid and expressionist works, coupled with his ability to evoke passion and emotion, his skill as a landscape painter is sometimes overlooked. Laid on with broad strokes and trailed fresh from the tube in places, applied unmixed and then melded with a knife or brush, yet rarely overworked, Yeats uses paint with great facility and flexibility to depict his native land. Many of his finest renderings draw on memories of the bogs and mountains around his home town of Sligo. In On To Glory the field is richly patterned with fresh greens, yellows and blues, while the sky is thinly laid in contrast. The canvas ground glints through as a clean textured white, in the manner of the fugitive sun through the scudding and billowing clouds endemic to the West. Walter Sickert recognised Yeats' skill at the present type of subject nascent as early as 1924: "Much of modern landscape has an imported air, and the figures are tucked away in corners. They are seldom doing something in the landscape. Instead the two elements should be knit together both psychologically and pictorially. The novelists know how to use landscape as part of the things that people feel and do. Yeats' landscapes are solidly constructed and occur behind figures which are active". Herbert Read, who quoted Sickert as above in his 1942 Nicholson and Yeats review, went on to comment that if this were true in 1924, "it is still more obvious in the artist's recent work, which shows an astonishing development in freedom and fusion".
John Berger offered the ultimate summary of the great appeal of Yeats' landscapes, transformed by the imagination as in On To Glory, in his article in the New Statesman and Nation, published on 8th December 1956, just prior to Yeats' death the following year:
'Yeats seems too mobile, over-spontaneous, until one has watched the west coast of Ireland. And watched is the word, for the landscape there is a fast series of events, not a view - an unchanging structure. The land is a passive as a bog can be. The sky is all action... a dancer, tender and wild alternately, and then furious, ripping her clothes and parading her golden body to get just one glimmer of response from the peat. And she gets it... it is this wild dancing and wilder response that Yeats has painted...' (also published as 'The Life and Death of an Artist', Permanent Red, Methuen, London, 1960). Thus in On To Glory the three key elements present in the best of Yeats' mature works are combined, and narrative and emotion are described through the artist's painterly response to the workings of his singular imagination.
