John Butler Yeats — Portraitist of the Irish Literary Revival

Irish Artist · 1839–1922

John Butler Yeats

Portraitist of the Irish Literary Revival — and father of the poet W.B. Yeats and the painter Jack B. Yeats.

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Portrait of W.B. Yeats by John Butler Yeats

His portrait of his own son, the poet W.B. Yeats — father drawing genius.

The Story

John Butler Yeats was one of Ireland's finest portrait painters — and the father of two of its greatest talents, the poet W.B. Yeats and the painter Jack B. Yeats. He drew the faces of the Irish Literary Revival with psychological honesty and a draughtsman's grace, and left a gallery of a nation's renaissance.

He was born on 16 March 1839 at Tullylish, Co. Down, the eldest son of a Church of Ireland rector. He entered Trinity College Dublin in 1857, graduated with honours and a prize in political economy, and was called to the Irish Bar in 1866 — then promptly abandoned it. In 1867 he took up painting and studied at Heatherley's School of Fine Art in London.

He was a wonderful portraitist, and an incurable one: he could catch a likeness and a soul, but he could rarely bring himself to finish. Pictures were reworked endlessly, deadlines missed, money always short. Yet the results are marvellous — John Millington Synge, Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, and above all his own remarkable children.

In December 1907, aged sixty-eight, he sailed to New York with his daughter Lily for what was meant to be a short visit, and never came home. He spent his last fourteen years in the city — from 1909 in the Petitpas sisters' boarding house on West 29th Street, where his talk drew a circle of young artists and writers to the table — working to the very end on a self-portrait he never quite finished. He died in New York on 3 February 1922, aged 82 — having drawn a movement, and fathered a family that changed Irish culture forever.

He married Susan Pollexfen of Sligo in 1863; their children were W.B., Lily, Lolly and Jack. The self-portrait he began for his patron John Quinn in 1911 was still unfinished eleven years later, on the day he died. The full story is in John Butler Yeats: the painter who could never finish.

Timeline

  • 1839 — Born 16 March at Tullylish, Co. Down.
  • 1862 — Graduates from Trinity College Dublin, then reads for the Bar.
  • 1866 — Called to the Irish Bar; soon abandons law.
  • 1867 — Takes up painting; studies at Heatherley's, London.
  • 1880s–1900s — Portraitist of the Irish Literary Revival.
  • 1907 — Sails for New York in December; remains there for the rest of his life.
  • 1922 — Dies 3 February in New York, aged 82.

Where He Lived

From a Co. Down rectory to a New York boarding house. Click a pin to follow his life.

Co. Down · Sligo · Dublin · London · New York — an Irish life that ended in Manhattan.

Featured Works

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Collector's Guide

The heart of any Yeats collection is his Portrait of W.B. Yeats — a father drawing his poet son. For the Revival itself, his Maud Gonne McBride and Augusta Gregory are essential, and his John Millington Synge was drawn in 1905, two years before The Playboy of the Western World. Part of our full Irish Art Prints collection.

The Yeats Lover's Gift Guide

Three ways into his world, at three price points.

Discover Similar Artists

Sarah Purser — fellow portraitist of literary Ireland. · William Orpen — Dublin's master draughtsman. · John Lavery — Ireland's great society portraitist.