Cover: Clúdach

The history of Ireland in the mid-twentieth-century as seen on postage stamps has been the theme of New Hibernia Review's 2006 volume. That series closes with our presentation of a 1977 commemorative issue honoring the painter Jack B. Yeats, who died on March 28, 1957. Yeats was inarguably Ireland's most famous painter at the time of his death and, indeed, ever since. During his lifetime, the painter himself adamantly opposed any reproduction of his work on aesthetic grounds. Since then, of course, numerous catalogs and books (notably the work of Hilary Pyle and Bruce Arnold's 1998 Jack Yeats) have made Yeats's creations familiar to millions—though chiefly his later, expressionistic oil paintings. The image on this stamp reflects an earlier period in Yeats's career, when he illustrated the first edition of John Millington Synge's work of literary nonfiction, The Aran Islands, published in 1907 and based on the weeks that the playwright spent on the Islands each year between 1898 and 1907. Yeats provided twelve illustrations for Synge's book. The original pen-and-ink drawing belongs to the Sligo County Library and Museum.

Stylistically, this figure also clearly resembles those found in the illustrations Yeats provided for Synge's articles in the Manchester Guardian in June and July, 1905, investigating the impoverished areas of Ireland in the care of the Congested Districts Board. In his image of an archetypal West of Ireland figure, Yeats shows well the "construction" of the Irish peasant during the Literary Revival; the strong folk figure—literally and metaphorically standing upright—presents a distinctly noble image, at once elemental and distant. His innate dignity is unsullied by the indignities of modernity: emigration, industrialism, and tourism. Yeats's passing in 1957 came only a little before T. K. Whitaker's First Programme for Economic Expansion was published, signaling an official departure from the nationalist self-reliance implicit in the image on this stamp.

In selecting this and earlier examples of Irish philately, we are grateful for the kind assistance of James H. Marrinan of St. Paul, an appraiser and specialist in Irish stamps and numismatics. This image appears here by kind permission of An Post ©.