John Butler Yeats

Essays Irish and American John Butler Yeats

We admire some because of their accomplishment, others because of what they are. I admire Mr. John Yeats as an artist as much as any, but I feel that nature's best gift to him was a humanity which delights in the humanity of others. Few artists I think found it more easy to be interested in the people they met or painted. All his portraits, whether of men or women, seem touched with affection. Rarely has he pourtrayed any, young or old, where something like a soul does not look at us through the eyes. I have liked people after seeing Mr. Yeats' portraits of them, and I am sure I would not have liked them so much if I had not first looked at them with his vision. In his delightful letters, of which extracts have been already published, and in his essays he lets us unconsciously into the secret of his meditation about his sitters. He is always discriminating between themselves and their ideas, searching for some lovable natural life.