Peoples Republic of South Devon

Jack B Yeats and the Devon connection

June 18th, 2008

Regular readers of the republic will have noticed that we’ve been banging on about Devon’s connection to Yeats. We got in touch with artist Michael Buckland, Yeats aficionado and resident artist at the Farringdon Society of Arts, to give us the low-down.

The Theban Chorus – Antigone Condemed by Michael Buckland, part of the FSA’s cultural offering on the Yeats tour

The Irish painter Jack Butler Yeats is less well known outside Ireland than his brother, the poet W B Yeats. However, Yeats can claim to be Ireland’s greatest artist of the 20th century. His distinctive oil paintings, romantic and expressionist in tone, draw upon the land and seascape of the west of Ireland. He also painted the circus, horse racing, fleeting moments of daily life and the streets and bars of Dublin.

This most Irish of artists was in fact born in London in 1871. He spent much of his childhood living with his grand parents in Sligo, but then moved back to London where he married. In 1897 he moved to Strete in Devon. During this period he worked in watercolour, having his first exhibition in London in the same year. This consisted of mostly Devon subjects. His mother’s ancestors, the Pollexfens, had lived at Kitley House, near Plymouth, which is now a hotel. Yeats’s grandfather, William Pollexfen was born in Brixham in 1811, the son of a Cornishman.

In 1910 Yeats moved to Ireland for good, first to County Wicklow then to Dublin. His painting became looser and broader in treatment as he grew older, often drawing on memory and recollection. He exhibited regularly in Dublin and abroad, his work selling well.

I came to know his work about 35 years ago and travelled to Ireland in search of the ‘Yeats spirit’. I painted watercolours in Galway, but did not make it to Sligo, although I saw his work in Dublin. His energy of drawing and fluid colours have stayed with me since then. I now paint in Devon where Jack B started his career over a hundred years ago.

• Read Stella Mew (chief exec of the Yeats Society) interview with the PRSD.

• As part of the Yeats cultural trail, the Farringdon Society of Arts put on a performance of Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes Sample, listen to the actors behind the stage during the rehearsals and check out the of the programme from Phig Billy (who will be holding a comic workshop on Saturday June 21)
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Entry Filed under: Arts, Society