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signed l.r.: JACK.B. / YEATS

watercolour over pencil

CATALOGUE NOTE

Painted circa 1896.
Two rival champion jockeys, seen from behind on their mounts, reach the winning post on a Sligo strand in a desperate finish. Figures rush in a crowd from the whiskey tents or lean forward from privileged seats on side cars craning their heads to see the result. The excitement in the air is intense. In the distance Knocknarea, famous for legends and relicts of prehistoric graves, is silhouetted against the glow of the evening sky.

Local strand races were a common theme for the artist at the beginning of his career, in pen and ink or in watercolour, which here is applied thinly over a light pencil outline, in low tones lifted with bright splashes to give compositional emphasis and zest to the painting. The choice of characters looks back to Cruikshankian prototypes, given an Irish flavour from the artist's personal experience, and includes a ballad singer, another favourite subject.

Yeats painted watercolour scenes of strand races at Drumcliff and Mullaghmore in County Sligo which he showed at the Royal Hibernian Academy annual exhibitions in Dublin in 1895 and 1896. This watercolour bearing his typical signature of those early years is similar in style and size to those already recorded. The location appears to be Cummen Strand, south east of Sligo town near Coney Island, immortalised in the poem, 'Red Hanrahan's song about Ireland', by the artist's brother, W.B. Yeats.

Hilary Pyle