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Jack B. Yeats, R.H.A.
1876-1957
come on the dawn
signed; inscribed with title on the reverse
oil on canvas
35.5 by 46 cm., 14 by 18 in.
Painted in 1951, Come on the Dawn features a man dressed in Yeats' characteristic blue, bent over his cupped hands as he lets a pool of water trickle through his fingers, his gaze arrested by the dawn brightening the sky over the distant sea. Hilary Pyle suggests that the man, though young, is a prototype of Yeats, and this further deepens the significance of the presence of three of the artist's favourite motifs within the composition: dawn, water and the sea, all of which hold symbolic importance when employed within Yeats' work.
Dawn is for men. Sunsets for ladies. Men all for hope, the women for musings they say... (Jack B. Yeats, Ah Well, Routledge, London, 1942).
Dawn was a subject which exercised a particular fascination for Yeats throughout his working life, the unique one-off nature of every manifestation rendering the phenomenon almost human to him - the dawn itself an individual player within the scene, invested with personality as much as any actual figure. The artist was drawn by the poignancy attached to the fleeting emergence of every new day: he once wistfully remarked that there were at least ten dawns he would wish to see again, if only he were able. Although Yeats resisted any strict analysis of his work, particularly the late 'pictures in the fire', the subject did serve on several occasions as a metaphor for both life and death.
The dawn brings fresh hope, but passes all too fast - as does life. In his 1948 canvas The Last Dawn But One (1948, coll. National Gallery of Ireland) circus travellers are portrayed as transient, impermanent figures, reminded every morning as they move on through the landscape that that particular dawn may be their 'last but one'. Fugitive as the dawn is, however, the presence of water, for Yeats a symbol of life, points to the corollary. Yeats was well-attuned to the complexities of life, and while there is sometimes a mood of prevailing tragedy in his work, the late visionary paintings are just as often about a sense of joy, the canvasses peopled with hardy folk happy to embrace the moment for whatever it has to offer. The distant suggested sea here offers a sense of possibility, evoking the lure of a better life in the west, as felt so powerfully by the younger generation from the mid-1920s onwards. The man's devout expression lends a powerful, almost mystical mood to the piece - there is a sense of newly awakened expectation in his uplifted face. Such a degree of imagination and emotion is most commonly found in the late works, where Yeats' expressive use of paint and abandoned colour is matched to the possible layers of meaning within his subjects. His brother W.B. summed up in High Talk the dichotomy at the heart of artistic depictions of the break of day - be they in words or paint:
Far up in the stretches of the night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.
(W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems, Macmillan Papermac, London, 1982, p.386).
Provenance:
Sold in the studio to Mr and Mrs Lederman, 1952
Mr Stephen Edlich, probably Liverpool
Waddington Galleries, London
Private Collection, New York
Waddington Galleries, London, whence acquired by the present owner
Exhibited:
London, Waddington Galleries, Jack B. Yeats, 1987, no.26, illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Literature:
Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings, Andre Deutsch, London, 1992, p.1002, no.1100, illustrated.