John Butler Yeats

poet focuses for only a moment on the suggestive image, without becoming involved in the problem - necessarily faced by the painter - of how two people can walk in a natural fashion while so united. The eye picks out the image as it passes in a stream of visual imagery spread out in time rather than organized in space - the flaming brand, the gate of paradise with its dreadful faces, the natural tears, the united hands, the steps which take their solitary way. Thus temporal sequence organizes visual effects in a manner for which there is no exact equivalent in painting and statuary. John Butler Yeats MICHAEL SIDNELL William M. Murphy. Prodigal Father: The Life ofJoh" Butler Yeats (,839-'922) Cornell University Press 1978. 688, i1lustrations. $27.50 The most satisfying phase of John Butler Yeats's life opened in 1908, his sixtyninth year, in New York. Some friends had presented a sum of money to enable the old painter to make a first, belated visit to Italy. John Butler Yeats used it for a passage to America with the intention, or pretext, of making a short stay that was to be highly productive of commissions and an alleviation of his chronic financial ills. His sons had already visited America - William with notable social and financial success - and his daughter Lollie (Elizabeth) had been there to drum up business for the Dun Emer enterprise. Now it was her sister Lily's tum, and she was going to promote Dun Emer at an Irish exhibition in New York. At the last moment her father tagged along. He went to New York against the advice of family and friends, including John Quinn, and contrived by many evasions and a hard stubbornness to stay there. Under the obliquely invoked providence ofJohn Quinn and with additional financial assistance from William, secretly given, the artist stayed in New York talking, sketching, painting (sometimes), writing letters and talking, talking, for the rest of his life. He died in 1922 in his one-room lodging, an unfinished self-portrait on the easel. This he had begun precisely eleven years earlier as a commission from John Quinn. The painting provides the frontispiece to William Murphy's biography, the only reproduction in colour in a book profusely and excellently illustrated with photographs, including many of John Butler Yeats's sketches. The selfportrait , in Murphy's context, is not so much a pre-eminent example of the art of an accomplished painter as the epitome of a life dedicated to process and only incidentally, and usually reluctantly, to production. John Butler Yeats was too busy perfecting the life to finish the work. Not that 'perfection' is at all a seemly word for a life that was decidedly messy, irresolute, frustrated, and frustrating. It was unlike most lives in that John Butler Yeats did not court his failures but let them happen. UNrvERSJTV OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX , NUMBER 2, WINTER 1979/80 0042-0247/80/0100-0180$00.00/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS JOHN BUTLER YEATS 181 The last fourteen years are the ones that, with good reason, Murphy particularly relishes. His biography leads up to John Butler Yeats's metamorphosis into a New Yorker as though this were the fulfilment of a purpose latent in the many years of failure and disappointment. Aiter 1908 the biographer's admiration for his subject receives comparatively few checks, and these slight ones, from disagreeable facts. He relates with gusto the triumphs ofJohn Butler Yeats's old age: the publication of the magnificent letters and the-essays; the tributes of admiration paid to John Butler Yeats's wit and charm as man and talker; the glory of his friendships. The supreme friend, John Quinn, was not only sensitive to John Butler Yeats's qualities, needs, and failings, but finely practical in sustaining the 'regular Confucian earthly paradise' of old Yeats's last years. Much more than that of a kind patron, Quinn's care had all but the natural bond to make it a model of filial piety and love. It was the precise antithesis ofJohn Butler Yeats's inadequacy as a father; an elegant disproof of balance-sheet morality; an affection resembling...