Books in Brief: Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats (1839-1922)

Prodigal Father: The Life of John Buller Yeats (1839-1922), by William M. Murphy (Cornell, 680 pp., $27.50). John Butler Yeats was the father of the poet William Butler Yeats and the painter Jack Yeats, and, until this present biography was published, his own colorful life was relegated to footnotes in books or articles about his famous offspring. John Butler Yeats has finally gotten his due, and we are richer for the exposure, thanks to the care with which William M. Murphy has done his research. He paints a vivid picture of the man and his times, and puts the lives of all the members of the Yeats family into context, allowing us to see them afresh. As a painter and personality, JBY, as he was known, was active in the Irish, Renaissance as well as in the literary and artistic world of the early twentieth century in the United States. His letters were collected by Ezra Pound and praised by T. S. Eliot. He numbered among his friends and foes all the major political and literary personalities in Ireland during his lifetime. In New York, where he spent his last 16 years, his friends and acquaintances included Van Wyck Brooks, Jack London, Conrad Aiken, John Sloan, Alan Seeger, Robert Henri, and others. Born in County Down, Ireland, in 1839, John Butler Yeats was the son of a Church of England rector. At 18, aspiring to follow in his father’s footsteps, he began to read copiously to reinforce his faith, and found that he had none. At 28, after one year as a lawyer, he announced to his young wife, without earlier notice, that he had decided to become an artist. With meager funds from property in Ireland (which he managed to mismanage), he shuffled his family around England and Ireland, seeking commissions for portraits and submitting works, which were refused, for exhibitions. JBY became a bohemian, but he was a bohemian without malice. He seemed merely to desire freedom from obligation and order at all costs. Typically, he failed to act when support was offered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Robert Browning. Whenever a particularly promising opportunity developed, he shirked it—as if getting on in this world terrified him. Yet, despite the general air of unfulfillment about JBY’s life, he completed scores of portraits and thousands of drawings of the chief personalities of modern Ireland. This is the conclusion toward which Mr. Murphy aims his book. If I have any complaint, it is that, in his search for detail, Murphy has opted for bare fact rather than analysis. Still, I believe this will be John Butler Yeats’s standard biography for years to come.

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Thomas Bridges

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Prodigal Father: The Life of John Buller Yeats (1839-1922), by William M. Murphy (Cornell, 680 pp., $27.50). John Butler Yeats was the father of the poet William Butler Yeats and the painter Jack Yeats, and, until this present biography was published, his own colorful life was relegated to footnotes in books or articles about his famous offspring. John Butler Yeats has finally gotten his due, and we are richer for the exposure, thanks to the care with which William M. Murphy has done his research. He paints a vivid picture of the man and his times, and puts the lives of all the members of the Yeats family into context, allowing us to see them afresh. As a painter and personality, JBY, as he was known, was active in the Irish, Renaissance as well as in the literary and artistic world of the early twentieth century in the United States. His letters were collected by Ezra Pound and praised by T. S. Eliot. He numbered among his friends and foes all the major political and literary personalities in Ireland during his lifetime. In New York, where he spent his last 16 years, his friends and acquaintances included Van Wyck Brooks, Jack London, Conrad Aiken, John Sloan, Alan Seeger, Robert Henri, and others. Born in County Down, Ireland, in 1839, John Butler Yeats was the son of a Church of England rector. At 18, aspiring to follow in his father’s footsteps, he began to read copiously to reinforce his faith, and found that he had none. At 28, after one year as a lawyer, he announced to his young wife, without earlier notice, that he had decided to become an artist. With meager funds from property in Ireland (which he managed to mismanage), he shuffled his family around England and Ireland, seeking commissions for portraits and submitting works, which were refused, for exhibitions. JBY became a bohemian, but he was a bohemian without malice. He seemed merely to desire freedom from obligation and order at all costs. Typically, he failed to act when support was offered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Robert Browning. Whenever a particularly promising opportunity developed, he shirked it—as if getting on in this world terrified him. Yet, despite the general air of unfulfillment about JBY’s life, he completed scores of portraits and thousands of drawings of the chief personalities of modern Ireland. This is the conclusion toward which Mr. Murphy aims his book. If I have any complaint, it is that, in his search for detail, Murphy has opted for bare fact rather than analysis. Still, I believe this will be John Butler Yeats’s standard biography for years to come.