Encounters with Jack B. Yeats; Episode 4 - The Visitor

<p>For the fourth episode of ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ The Model, home of the Niland Collection presents ‘The Visitor.’ A radio play directed by Isabel Claffey, with the roles of the visitor and the artist, played respectively by Yuji Shimobayashi and Ultan Burke. This short radio play was adapted from an essay by Shotaro Oshima (1899-1980), a Japanese scholar-poet and later professor of English Literature in Waseda University, Tokyo. In this essay, Shotaro described a visit to Jack B. Yeats’s studio in Fitzwilliam Square on a rainy summer’s day in 1938.</p> <p>Jack B. Yeats in his Devon home, c.1900, with his dog, Hooligan. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland, ©Yeats Archive. From the late 1920s, Jack’s artistic style was to change radically, and Jack compares these changes to the similar wayward revolution in the use of language by James Joyce. During the inter-war years, the artist’s line becomes subsumed within a torrent of rich impastoed paint. He was drawing in colour, even though he had begun his artistic career as a draughtsman, earning his living as a comic artist and illustrator from the 1880s, where he used the pseudonym, W. Bird for the cartoons he drew for the satirical magazine ‘Punch'.</p> <p>Two years before the interview with Shotaro, Jack painted a series of visionary works underpinned by mythological themes: ‘California,’ ‘A Race in Hy Brazil’ and ‘Helen.’ This latter work is discussed in the interview with Shotaro, as is another important oil painting by the artist, ‘Death for Only One,’ which the writer, revolutionary fighter and close friend to the artist, Ernie O’Malley purchased after seeing the work in the artist’s studio. The composition of ‘Death for Only One’ suggests the civil war period in Ireland, and was possibly one of the reasons, why Ernie O’Malley was initially drawn to this darkly painted and emotive work.</p> <p>The stylistic changes that took place within Jack’s work during these years were out of step with French and English trends, and as the art histo