Voices of the Past: Jack Yeats and Thomas MacGreevy in Conversation

Abstract

I never met Jack Yeats, but I recall my mother pressing my elbow when I was still a boy, to point out Jack Yeats’s back disappearing into a Dublin bookshop. I knew from family knowledge and the tone of my mother’s voice that even to have seen no more than this was an event. Two of his oils hung on the walls of my parents’ home and, though I am recalling the early 1950s, there was no question in the Purser family mind but that Jack was one of the great painters. The Old Trotter was a constant pleasure: nobody ever painted so many horses with such feeling for their character and sensual vigour. This old horse had the eye of experience, as did the man on the trotting cart she was to draw behind her in a race, no doubt somewhere in London. Behind her and the driver were the pink-roofed sheds, the yard, and beside the horse’s head a man was looking outwards with a kindly expression, confident the old beast would do the best that could be done. The relationship between the two men and the animal was so perfectly realised that all three were equal characters. You could imagine what they might be saying, and it was clear that they all understood each other perfectly well.