Painter, born in London, UK, the brother of W B Yeats. Educated in Co Sligo, his first works were illustrations and strip cartoons, such as Chubblock Homes for Comic Cuts. He is best known for his colourful, freely painted pictures of Irish daily life and Celtic mythology, produced after 1915.
Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957) was an Anglo-Irish artist.
Yeats's early style was that of an illustrator and almost a cartoonist (he produced the first cartoon strip version of Sherlock Holmes in 1894);
Beginning around 1920, Yeats developed into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism. However, he believed that 'a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints', and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helped articulate a modern Ireland of the twentieth century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man. When he died, Samuel Beckett wrote that 'Yeats is the great of our time...he brings light as only the great dare to bring light to the issueless predicament of existence'.
Yeats won a silver medal at the 1924 Olympic Games in painting.
Yeats's favourite subjects include the Irish landscape (and sky), horses, the circus and travelling players. Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the twentieth century (and the first to sell for over £1m), he took no pupils and allowed no one watch him work, so he remains a unique figure.
Besides painting, Yeats had a significant interest in theatre and in literature. Yeats's paintings usually bear poetic and evocative titles. He was the youngest son of Irish portraitist John Butler Yeats, and the brother of the Nobel Prize winning poet William Butler Yeats, both of whom fully acknowledged all his talents. Indeed, his father recognized that Jack was a far better painter than he, and also believed that 'some day I will be remembered as the father of a great poet, and the poet is Jack'.
Yeats was married to the painter Mary Cottenham White ('Cottie') in 1894 and elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916.
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