Preface to John Butler Yeats, Early Memories: Some Chapters of Autobiography (1923)

Abstract

My father died in New York on February 2nd, 1922, at the end of his eighty-second † year. He died after a few hours’ † illness brought on, as it seemed, by a long walk in the cold of a New York winter. He awoke in the middle of the night to find his friends Mrs Foster and Mr John Quinn sitting beside his bed and after a few words of pleasure at the sight said to Mrs Foster, † ‘Remember you have promised me a sitting in the morning.’ These were his last words for he dropped off to sleep and died in his sleep.¹ He had gone to America some ten or twelve years before to be near my eldest sister who had an exhibition of embroidery there, and though she left after a few months he stayed on.² ‘At last,’ he said, † ‘I have found a place where people do not eat too much at dinner to talk afterwards.’ As he grew infirm his family and his friends constantly begged him to return, but, though he promised as constantly and would even fix the day of sailing, he would always ask for a few weeks more. He lived in a little French hotel in 29th Street where there is a café and night after night sat there, sketch book in hand, surrounded by his friends, painters and writers for the most part, who came to hear his conversation.³