Jack B. Yeats was the son of portrait painter John Butler Yeats and younger brother of the poet William Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in Sligo, which remained a permanent source of inspiration for his painting. He studied art in London and soon earned a high reputation for pen and ink drawings in magazines. In 1910, after a period in Devon, he settled in Dublin where he devoted himself to painting in oils. Yeats was closely connected to the literary personalities of his day; John Masefield and J. M. Synge became his close friends. In the 1930s and '40s he published novels and plays which won the admiration of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. His paintings have been exhibited in many major galleries, and continue to be exhibited thirty years after his death.

This monograph seeks to recover and assess the critically neglected comic strip work produced by the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats for various British publications, including Comic Cuts, The Funny Wonder, and Puck, between 1893 and 1917. It situates the work in relation to late-Victorian and Edwardian media, entertainment and popular culture, as well as to the evolution of the British comic during this crucial period in its development. Yeats’ recurring characters, including circus horse Signor McCoy, detective pastiche Chubblock Homes, and proto-superhero Dicky the Birdman, were once very well-known, part of a boom in cheap and widely distributed comics that Alfred Harmsworth and others published in London from 1890 onwards. The repositioning of Yeats in the context of the comics, and the acknowledgement of the very substantial corpus of graphic humour that he produced, has profound implications for our understanding of his artistic career and of his significant contribution to UK comics history. This book, which also contains many examples of the work, should therefore be of value to those interested in Comics Studies, Irish Studies, and Art History.

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A text which follows the life and work of Jack B. Yeats - arguably Ireland's most famous painter - from his colourful family background, through his early days as a line illustrator, to the latter years when his originality and use of colour earned him comparisons with Titian and Giorgone.

Jack B. Yeats is probably the greatest painter Ireland has ever produced, although he is often overshadowed somewhat by his more famous brother, the poet W. B. Yeats. First published to great acclaim in 1993, this is one of very few popular books on Yeat's work. With more than 100 colour plates and 175 black and white illustrations, it is an authoritative and glorious appreciation of Yeats's vast and varied output.

Jack B. Yeats, son of a painter and brother of the poet, is undoubtedly the outstanding Irish painter of this century. His work is collected by all the major galleries of modern art, and is currently attracting very high prices. In 1970 Hilary Pyle published an excellent biography of Yeats, and since then she has been working on the complete catalogue of his works: a lavish oils catalogue came out in 1992. Yeats is unique among Irish artists in that he spent the first twelve years of his career working solely in watercolour, bringing the technique to a perfection comparable with Turner and Cezanne, prior to choosing oil as his medium. This watercolour catalogue includes over 700 examples of his work dating from 1897 to 1910, with further examples from earlier and later periods. For each entry there is technical data (comprising title of painting, measurements, signature if signed, dates and details of its being exhibited, etc.) with an explanatory paragraph where needed. There are numerous thumb-nail reproductions for identification, and sixteen pages of colour illustrations.

Includes letters from Jack B Yeats to his father, John Quinn 'The Man from New York' and Sarah Purser. This book contains drawings and illustrations by Jack, and shows the six works he exhibited at the Armory Show in New York.