Rowan Gillespie

(Irish, born 1953)

Study for W.B.Yeats 65.8 cm. (25 7/8 in.) high (including the base)

Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, Ireland

W.B. Yeats was one of the most important literary figures of the first half of the twentieth century. Born outside Dublin and educated across Dublin and London, Yeats took an early interest in poetry, influenced keenly by the Romantics Keats, Wordsworth and William Blake. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, two years after the Irish independence he had given passionate, expressive voice to through his poetry, had been achieved.

The present work is drawn from a personal connection to the poet. Gillespie's grandparents were closely acquainted with the Yeats family, and indeed Gillespie's mother was born the same day as Yeats' daughter Anne in the same maternity ward; Yeats, who was already in the hospital, met the new-born before her father had arrived.

Gillespie conceived of the present work with a specific image in mind: that of Yeats holding court at a function, carrying an air of exuberance and authority, offering words of wisdom as if spontaneous, yet the artist suspects penned in advance. It is one of the original maquettes for the resultant work, W.B. Yeats, that was erected in Sligo in 1990. The book was removed from subsequent casts and the final work, giving way to an expressive hand gesture evocative of the imagined scene of inspiration.

We are grateful to the artist for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.