John Butler Yeats

John Butler Yeats was born in County Down and studied law at Trinity College, Dublin. He qualified as a barrister and with his considerable connections was assured a good practice at the bar. In 1862 he went to County Sligo to visit his old school friend George Pollexfen. When he married Susan Pollexfen, George's sister, in 1863, the Sligo landscape and the Pollexfen family were destined to become significant influenced on his talented children.

In 1867 Yeats abandoned his legal practice and moved to London to study painting at Heatherly's Art school. He was attracted to the Pre-Raphaelite painters and did book illustrations for Robert Browning's poetry. However his real talent lay in portraiture as is evidenced in the many character studies he did of his children. The market for portrait painting in Dublin was limited, so in 1887 he moved his family to London where his hopes of becoming a successful illustrator met with little success. In 1892 he was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy and his career took am upward turn when in 1901 a retrospective exhibition of his work and that of Nathaniel Hone was organised by Sarah Purser in Dublin (qv). She brought Hugh Lane (qv) to see the exhibition. Lane was so impressed by Yeats' talent that he commissioned him to paint a series of portraits of notable figures in Irish life. But Yeats disliked the fetters of a large commission and completed just five of the portraits before he left Ireland for New York in 1907, aged 67. In New York he met up with John Quinn, the eminent American Irish lawyer, who introduced him to his fellow Irish American colleagues. Yeats loved New York and he resided at a small pension, Petitpas, on West 29th street. His brilliant conversation attracted a circle of young artists and writers to his table. He never made a financial success of his artistic career, but his work is recognised as an important contribution to the evolution of the 20th century Irish art. He had an extremely talented family; his eldest son, William Butler Yeats, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1923; his other son, Jack Butler Yeats, became one of the most significant expressionist painters of the 20th century and his daughters, Susan Mary, known as Lily and Elisabeth Corbet, known as Lollie immortalised in James Joyce's Ulysses as the "two designing sisters", were actively involved in the Irish arts and crafts movement, most particularly the Dun Emer Industries and the Cuala Printing Press