Jack B. Yeats’s Illustrations for His Brother

Abstract

At no time in their lives were the Yeats brothers, WB and Jack, more close than in the last years of the 1880s and the first years of the 1890s. Jack, who had spent most of his schooldays in Sligo, came to London in 1887 to live with his family, who had recently returned from Dublin. His father, John Butler Yeats (or JBY), took a temporary house in Earl’s Court for the summer of 1887, a house associated by most of the family with noise, depression and illness, and no advancement of their father’s career. By January he had found a house which satisfied everybody. In the new Bohemian area of London, Bedford Park was the “‘pauper’s paradise’”, according to Oliver Elton in his life of York Powell, “rich in talk and in the gifts of the spirit”.¹ No. 3 Blenheim Road was tall and airy, with a studio for JB and a study for Willy: and they moved there in March 1889. While John Butler Yeats’s hopes of earning his living by becoming an illustrator during this period may have been less than successful, it was here that both his sons made valuable contacts with writers, publishers and artists; and so were laid the foundations of their future professions.