“Irrigated Neither by the Seine Nor by the Thames”: Jack B. Yeats’s Reception in London

• Main Author: Nathan O'Donnell
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Yale University 2019-11-01
• Series: British Art Studies
• Online Access: http://britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-14/jack-yeats-reception-in-london

This article investigates the history of the joint exhibition of Jack B. Yeats and William Nicholson at the National Gallery in 1942, an exhibition that has been described as the show that “made [Yeats’s] name in London”. The received narrative posits it as a “breakthrough” exhibition, an important British tribute to an Irish artist, precipitating Yeats’s acknowledgement at home and boosting the sale of his work internationally. What this account obscures are the decades Yeats had spent exhibiting and cultivating his reputation in London, the city where he had been born and educated, and where his career as an artist had started. This article examines the cross-currents of cultural diplomacy and wartime bureaucracy that led to the 1942 exhibition but also looks beyond them, at Yeats’s relationships within the London art world, including his connection to a network of artists and cultural figures who had supported him through the preceding decades: in particular, a dealer and gallerist whose name has not, to date, figured in the scholarship surrounding Yeats’s work, Lillian Browse. An examination of their relationship reveals Yeats as an engaged, responsive artist, attentive to developments in both British and European art, rather than a strictly “national” painter operating—as one critic put it—on the “periphery of the twentieth century”.