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AUGUSTUS EDWIN JOHN OM RA (1878-1961) MODERN BRITISH (20th Century ) Portrait of William Butler Yeats, September 1907 (1907 Wales)

00410

Black chalk on paper

Signed

21.50cm wide   34.00cm high (8.46 inches wide  13.39 inches high)

Hugh Chisholm
Mrs John Hay Whitney, Manhasset, Long Island
Estate of Mrs John Hay Whitney; to 1999

Augustus John was first commissioned to paint William Butler Yeats for A. H. Bullen’s edition of the collected works of the poet. The edition was to contain a portrait by a contemporary artist and accordingly an invitation arrived from Lady Gregory for Augustus to stay with her in Ireland. Both artist and poet went reluctantly. However, Yeats became a source of inspiration for Augustus, who later recalled that with his lank forelock falling over his russet brow, his myopic eyes and hierarchic gestures, he was every inch a twilight poet. Pencil studies from this commission now hang in the National Portrait Gallery in London and in the National Gallery of Ireland.

Yeats, initially, was shocked by the severity of Augustus’s portrait:

I felt rather a martyr to him, the students consider him the greatest living draughtsman, the only modern who draws like an old master. But he makes everybody perfectly hideous, beautiful according to his own standard. He exaggerates every hill and hollow of the face till one looks a gypsy, grown old in wickedness and hardship.(1)

Despite these complaints, the poet came to admire Augustus and recognised in his portrayal an Anglo-Irish solitude, a solitude I have made for myself, an outlawed solitude(2) and described Augustus as a delight, and his portraits as beautiful. And so poet and artist became great friends and would sit up late in intimate talk.


(1) Michael Holroyd, Augustus John, Heinemann, London 974, page 260
(2) Ibid, page 262