John Sloan and John Butler Yeats: Records of a Friendship

John Sloan and John Butler Yeats: Records of a FriendshipAuthor(s): Robert GordonSource: Art Journal, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Spring, 1973), pp. 289-296Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/775810 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 22:34

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.212 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 22:34:31 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/775810?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


John Sloan and John Butler Yeats: Records of a Friendship Robert Gordon

John Sloan first met John Butler Yeats at a restaurant in New York, the Casalinga Club, on July 22, 1909:

The dining room is in the garden of a house on 38th St. We met beside the [Robert] Henris . . . Mr. Yeats the father of W. B. Yeats, Irish poet. Mr. Yeats was a very interesting old gentleman with white beard. Kindly and well informed, he is a painter, I believe, also a writer.1

Sloan was soon to celebrate his thirty-ninth birthday; the widowed Irishman was seventy. Up to that date Sloan had not sold a single painting, supporting himself and his wife Dolly by illustrations in books, magazines, and newspapers; Yeats had been a modestly successful artist for forty years, with works in various private collections in the British Isles and, in this country, in the growing collection of the lawyer John Quinn.2 The history of their friendship, in art and words, provides a fas- cinating commentary not only upon the two men and their associates but upon the artistic world of New York.

Yeats had come to the United States at the beginning of 1908 with his daughter Susan Mary ("Lily"), for a showing of her embroideries at an exhibit in Madison Square Garden. In June Lily went home to Dublin, but her slender, bearded father stayed on. As early as Octo- ber 1, 1908, there were evidences outside the family of displeasure on the part of the four Yeats children at their father's continued vagrancy. On that date Yeats's good friend the poet and mystic George Russell ("AE") wrote to John Quinn:

. . . I quite agree that J. B. Y. is altogether past the time for any new adventures in strange countries. His daughters want him back and are alarmed about his long absence. I think they have done their utmost to induce him to return, though probably he would not have told you. I see both girls very often and they tell me all the news about their "Pilgrim Father" as they call him. I recommended them to cable "Fam- ily all dying. Come to receive last messages". But they said he would not come for that, and I don't know what will bring him.3

ROBERT GORDON is Assistant Professor of English at Mont- clair (N.J.) State College. His essays and poems have appeared in numerous periodicals. The author adds the following note: For various courtesies shown to me in the preparation of this paper, I wish to express my grati- tude to the curators and staffs of the Chestertown (N.Y.) Museum of Local History, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Delaware Art Museum, The National Gallery, Dub- lin, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the manuscript room of the New York Public Library, and the Princeton University Library; and to Mrs. Helen Farr Sloan. Yeats manuscripts, unless otherwise noted, are copy- right Anne and Michael Yeats.-R.G. U

Besides his two daughters, busy with their crafts (which included the Cuala Press), Yeats was the father of two sons. William, called "Willie" within the family, was

already well-known as a poet, if not yet the world-figure of later years; and Jack, who was to become the greatest of Irish painters, had been born, like John Sloan, in 1871. (Centennial exhibitions for both men took place in

1971-2.) Willie, although not yet financially secure, had already published his Collected Works in 1908, the year in which his father emigrated-eight volumes printed by the Shakespeare Head Press in Stratford-on-Avon. For his

part, Jack had illustrated several volumes, one of them on Ireland's west country by his friend John Millington Synge. With all his children, but especially with Willie, JBY was to carry on a fourteen-year correspondence about the nature of art, poetry, life, and belief. But if he was to be the head of a family, and one of ever-growing distinction, it was to be in absentia.

For several months after his arrival he lived in the Grand Union Hotel on 42nd Street. Ultimately, after several shifts, he moved to a boarding-house at 317 West 29th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Today the building has been remodelled, with a recent brick fa- cade, and has become a five-story apartment house. In 1909 it was the establishment of the Mlles. Petitpas, three Breton ladies who took the place over before the turn of the century with almost nothing and retired to France,

wealthy, in 1919. Yeats's good friend Mary Colum observed in her autobiography:

The boardinghouse was in that era a characteristic feature of New York life, and I wonder so few ingenious fiction writers found material in them. They were generally, though not always, run by foreigners, who seemed to have the knack and the training to make them pay. . . . For the sum of seven dollars a week each we [she and her husband Padraic] were provided with a large room up four flights and two meals a day. . . .4

Yeats put his books on the shelves-he was fond of small volumes he could read on streetcars and even while walk-

ing-and was ready to begin again in the New World. His was, Mary Colum wrote, "a dingy room with an iron bed, a cheap worn rug, and an easel on which was always erected a portrait at which he tinkered day after day."5 The Petitpas' small restaurant was on the street floor, with an open kitchen in an adjoining front room. In the summer, according to a man who sometimes ate there,

. . . tables were arranged in the little yard. Buildings arose north and south and the areas to the east were fenced off. As the meal progressed, (it was an exceedingly bad meal but no one seemed to care), the twilight faded and windows in a near-by building would frame an occasional ruddy light. Sometimes a topic of conversation was based on imagining what might be taking place in any of the rooms from whence these early lights would glow. Romance, according to Mr. Yeats, was the unknown thing which the light suggested. Were one able to see within the room, romance would cease,-no matter how interesting the life therein. It sounded plausible at the time.6

289



John Sloan, Yeats at Petitpas, 1910, oil on canvas, 27 X 32". The Corcoran Gallery of Art. From the left the figures are Van Wyck Brooks, Yeats, Alan Seeger, Dolly Sloan, Celestine Petitpas (in the act of serving), Robert Sneedon, Mrs. Charles Johnson, Eulabee Dix, Fred King, and, in the corner, Sloan.

Here Yeats took his place at the head of a long table.

Usually his sketchbook was in his hand. He drew almost

constantly, even in relaxation, and he carried the characteristic over into his minutely-written correspondence as well: often his letters are as much cartoons as text.

According to the entries in John Sloan's New York Scene, Yeats was first invited to the Sloans' apartment in West Twenty-Third Street for dinner on August 16, 1909; a month after, he was telling them of a play he wanted to write; and by October 4 Sloan noted, with his

painter's eye for detail:

. . . Mr. Yeats called late in the afternoon and I enjoyed his company very much. He is a fine unspoiled old artist gentleman. His vest is slightly spotted; he is real.7

That night, his wife being away, Sloan went to dinner with Yeats-apparently his first visit to the Petitpas'. And on November 25-Thanksgiving-Yeats was among the twelve who sat down at table to turkey at the Sloans'.

Yeats, in turn, read a play by Synge to the company. The friendship of the two men, and of Yeats with

Dolly Sloan, grew into a comfortable and lasting one,

perhaps even a necessary one for them all. Sloan's second wife and widow, Helen Farr Sloan, has recalled:

Sloan said that Yeats immediately made himself a member of the family, and right away there was a very fine rapport between old Mr. Yeats and Dolly. He had an intuitive feeling for women, and an especially sensitive one for Dolly. ... He had a very great gift for bringing out and appreciating per- sonality; so whenever he came in the house, if Dolly was in a low mood, he apparently was able to give her a lift.... She had a neurosis too deep-seated to be cured. She was what you call a manic-depressive. When Yeats was in the house, he was able to make her feel that he, a scholar, believed in her.8

Sloan's first tribute to their friendship was an oil

sketch, 9 X 11 inches, My Two Friends Yeats and Henri (John Sloan catalogue #1058), which he executed after

supper on January 18, 1910. It shows the two men seated

290



comfortably in chairs beside Sloan's fireplace, both of them apparently drawing. According to Helen Farr Sloan:

The coloring is in warm browns-one gets the feeling of a cozy corner in a study. I would say that Sloan completed the little picture all in one sitting. It is rich in tonality-the chiaroscuro -transparent tones in the background-the feeling of light moving over the figures and "opening up" the obscure areas in the background-as one feels this when looking quietly at a room with one lamp and perhaps firelight.9

Unfortunately, the painting disappeared without a trace shortly after Sloan's death in 1951.

Largely at the instigation of Sloan and his early mentor Robert Henri, the Exhibition of Independent Artists took place during April, 1910. Paintings, drawings, and sculpture were entered by Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, George Bellows, and others whose work had hitherto been largely ignored. Contrib- uting with them was John Butler Yeats, with two oils-a portrait of the Irish editor John O'Leary, lent by John Quinn, and a self-portrait-and seven drawings, including one of the recently-dead John Millington Synge. Thus early in his American stay, Yeats was identifying himself with the new movement in art away from a cau- tious conservatism-a movement that resulted, in 1913, in the famous Armory Show.

Evidence of Sloan's respect for JBY appears in his journal entry of May 6, 1910, recounting a conversation with the cartoonist Rollin Kirby:

He is an aggravation to me! Like a monk's hair shirt I use him for penance, I suppose. He said Yeats was an awful example of the artist life! Old, no great works done, poor! A failure! -The idiot. Mr. Yeats is a tremendous success. He has lived and had the poet's joy. He has known people. He is still young in spirit, attracts young people around him. If he were a sleek scoundrel of a tradesman or broker worth a million K. would call him a success.10

Two days afterwards, Yeats invited Sloan to accompany him to John Quinn's apartment. There, in Quinn's ever- expanding collection, Sloan saw for the first time a num- ber of the paintings of his exact contemporary Jack B. Yeats. A question worth considering is whether John Sloan was a substitute, an alternate son, for John Butler Yeats. What certainly seems clear is that Yeats became a father-figure to Sloan, replacing the memory of the un- successful real father whose business failure had pulled young Sloan out of school at sixteen, denying him further formal education, and put him to work supporting his family. Helen Farr Sloan has observed:

Because Yeats was able to help him with his painting, and was participating right in the household in a very domestic way, helping him with Dolly, you could see why he became another father to him. At other times Sloan had said that Henri was his "father in art"-as a phrase-but in a deep sense Yeats was closer to him, much closer.1"

J. B. Yeats, Portrait of John and Dolly Sloan, July, 1910, pencil on paper.

On July 28, 1910, the Sloans celebrated Dolly's birthday by joining Yeats at the Petitpas' for dinner. Sloan's own birthday was August 2, and, his mind still freshly holding the images of a few evenings before, "I worked on a new canvas, the Petitpas' Yard 'our table,' Mr. Yeats at the head of it."12 Three days after, his ninth wedding anniversary, Sloan

.. worked all day with great resulting fatigue on the Petitpas' Yard picture, and Mr. Yeats called and asked us as usual to please come around and have our dinner there. We agreed as I wanted to see the subject of the picture again.... The young poet [Alan] Seeger and his friend Reeves were late comers. Seeger annoys me when I'm not feeling in good spirits. He has so much I call it priggishness. Mr. Yeats says it is harmless and that every young poet is that way. He knows for he "raised a poet."13

In Sloan's published diaries he notes having spent August 6, 9, and 15 on the painting, with Yeats stopping by to make suggestions. When the young Van Wyck Brooks paid a call, Sloan had him sit for two hours so that he could put him into the picture. Brooks at the time was only two years out of Harvard, but already he had published the first of his many volumes of criticism. A pastel portrait of Brooks, done by Yeats in 1909, stands as the frontispiece of Brooks's An Autobiography, in which he wrote: ". . . I had never been touched by any- one's intellect until in 1909 I met J. B. Yeats,-the old Irish poet in whom I found a master... ."14

291



Sloan's last journal entry mentioning the painting is August 17. Whenever it was completed-the Sloans went off to Philadelphia on the 19th-it is a large, bright, self- confident painting that shows ten convivial men and women gathered in the Petitpas garden, under a bright overhead lamp.

When the Kraushaar Gallery had an exhibition of Sloan's oils in 1917, Yeats wrote about the work in a magazine essay:

Here Mr. Sloan is again the historian and remembering the portrait of myself I hope a confessed caricaturist. It reminds me of Dickens. There is only one figure sympathetically ren- dered. It is that of Alan Seeger and was painted long before this war in which he was killed; on every other face is a smile which is wicked portraiture. Seeger is sitting as I so often saw him, courteously attentive yet himself silent, his head droop- ing forward, all of him in deep shadow-a man with the poet's soul, of which there is ample evidence in what he has written -it is scarce among the writers of accomplished verse. It was characteristic of Sloan to introduce this note of tender ap- preciation into the noisy scene. One is tempted to think that he is psychic and knew what must happen.15

Regarding all the delineations but Seeger's, Yeats is exag- gerating; for a few paragraphs before in the same essay he compliments Sloan for his truth-telling, his "accurate portraiture." By 1917, Sloan had sold only one or two oils, yet Yeats compares him favorably in the article to Hogarth and Rossetti, even suggesting Sloan's effects of light as similar to Giorgione's.

The painting measures 27" x 32". From the left, to the viewer, its figures are Brooks, JBY, Seeger, Dolly Sloan, Celestine Petitpas in the act of serving the group, the writer and editor Robert Sneddon, in the foreground, Mrs. Charles Johnson (the Russian-born wife of an Irish Sanskrit scholar), partly hidden by her, the miniaturist Eulabee Dix, the journalist Fred King, and, in the shadowy far corner, John Sloan himself. Depicted in the act of sketching, JBY is seated beneath a draped French tri- color. Sloan's own descriptive note appeared in his Gist

of Art:

It is a satisfaction to have painted this record of Yeats whose portraits in Dublin and England establish him, according to Robert Henri, as the best British portrait painter of the Vic- torian era.16

Once finished, the painting remained, like Sloan's other oils, unsold. His meeting Quinn through Yeats, though, had had good results: on June 12, 1910, the law-

yer came to Sloan's studio to buy an etching, with Yeats's advice, and wound up ordering a complete set of the series Sloan had done to illustrate a novel. This repre- sented Sloan's first notable sale to a private collector. And by February 26, 1911, Quinn had ordered one print from each of Sloan's etchings as he did them, and one of any in the future.

About the same time, February 22, 1911, Yeats too had acquired a commission from Quinn: a self-portrait in

oils. Its execution over the years to come gives a revealing insight into the relationships among Sloan, Yeats, and their patron. By March 3 Yeats had set to his task, using a mirror for the pose, as was his custom. In early April Yeats was taken away by Quinn to visit the Virginia es- tate of the millionaire Thomas Fortune Ryan, but by April 22 he was back at the easel. Sloan observed: "Mr. Yeats working on his own portrait. He gets it in a very interesting state and then piffles along and (I think) for- gets to intend to paint it and at the end of each day it is

just a mess."17 Yeats's dilatory working habits, familiar to his English and Irish friends, were a revelation to the more dutiful, industrious American.

On April 25, "Mr. Yeats worked at his portrait from 3 o'clock on. Ars longa-vita-he is seventy-four years about!"'8 In May, Sloan noted that a Philadelphia woman had said, in telling JBY's fortune, that he would have "a steady occupation in his future. He mentioned this today and was amused when I told him that it evidently pointed to the present portrait of himself. He put in a good day's effort of his sort. I'm convinced it's not concentrated effort."19 Throughout May Yeats came to Sloan's studio to paint, with little apparent result. At last, though, on May 27, he painted all day; and when Robert Henri visited the Sloans that evening, he re- marked how the portrait pleased him.

Sloan's description of the next morning's events shows one artist in judgment upon another:

... I told him how Henri had liked it as it was last night. He seemed pleased and then in spite of my warning to go easy and finish it, he got to work and beat it to death-so that at lunch time I let out at him and scolded wickedly and with my own trouble in my own work in the back of my mind I talked cruelly and I'm sorry for it. For the thing was painted out and away, and no scolding could bring it back. I was ashamed and he was disheartened for the first time. I, in a glass house, threw cruel stones ... 20

Perhaps in amendment for his rare, sudden anger-their differences over Socialism and other points of disagree- ment were marked by long, good-natured discussions rather than by argument-Sloan's next entry asserts that he and Yeats enjoyed their joint work in the studio. Nev- ertheless, two days afterwards he recorded that Yeats had spent all day on his project, "which has become a sort of boogaboo to me."21

On the first of June, Sloan moved to a new studio, with JBY painting right up until the time his mirror and easel were taken away. That is the last entry concerning Yeats's self-portrait-the journals as published go up only to May 21, 1913-but it is hardly the last to be heard about the painting. When Yeats died in 1922 it was still incomplete, in spite of all John Quinn's abjurations and indignation; and finally Quinn shipped it off to the children in Dublin. Today, its surface crusted thick with lay- ers of paint, it is part of the collection of Willie's son,

292



Senator Michael Yeats-the final image of the Pilgrim Fa- ther.

Throughout the years of Yeats's American residence, references to Sloan and his wife turn up constantly in his indefatigable, microscopically written correspondence- correspondence so nearly unreadable that two of its most frequent recipients, William Butler Yeats and John Quinn, elected to have typists transcribe it rather than strain their eyes attempting to decipher it. In July of 1912 Yeats wrote to Quinn: "Sloan is reading Ruskin, with what results as regards his art and himself I shall be curious to know. Ruskin loved bright colors connecting them in his mind with poetry and holiness, gloomy opaque color meant sadness and sin."' '22 Three months later he was telling the lawyer: "I am more and more impressed with his genius, particularly since I have made myself ac- quainted with Goethe. His productivity is immense 8c his progress since he has been working so much from a model is wonderful."23 A year later he wrote:

Sloan is making 250. dollars a week, which is a good thing for him and his friends, as he is in much better spirits and his wife looks better-Through their efforts I have had accepted by "Harper's Weekly" an article on Sloan's pictures-There are to be three other articles written on Glackens and Bellow [sic] &c [illegible]-& the Sloans are helping to get me the job -I got 100 dollars for the article 8c 25. additional for a portrait sketch of Sloan-24

The article appeared in Harper's as "The Work of John Sloan" (subtitled on the magazine's table of con- tents "Some reasons why we print his pictures") on No- vember 22, 1913. It was two pages containing some 1800 words with four illustrations in black and white of Sloan's oils, The Dust Storm, Scrubwomen in the Old Astor Library (a painting which resulted from a visit Sloan made with Yeats to that building), The Hair-dress- er's Window, and McSorley's Back Room. Yeats discussed the values of each-a remarkable attempt at public education, since Sloan's entire work in oils was still largely unknown and entirely unsold. Of McSorley,'s he wrote:

One can never be tired of peering into that gloom as one is never tired of looking to the far horizon when darkness is coming on. Every painter, from the time of Leonardo da Vinci has felt the charm of chiaroscuro. Mr. Sloan is one of the few who have painted it. To paint chiaroscuro is to make a picture of infinity.25

Like Sloan's own journal-notes, the article again gives one craftsman's view of the other:

Mr. Sloan's pictures will excite strong enthusiasm but also many antagonisms. For one thing he does not arrange his pictures according to the laws of good taste nor does he care at all for the purely decorative picture which, however charm- ing it may be, is only like a pretty woman prettily dressed or a pretty room prettily furnished. In fact, he does not arrange his pictures at all. He is an impressionist, that is, an imaginative painter, and paints by the inner life. "His subject directs him," to quote the words of Charles Lamb who, long before the impressionists, defined the meaning of imaginative paint-

ing. One has to live many days with one of his pictures to find its sweetness, its poetic charm. He does not take his art lightly. Like the good medieval painters, he is serious about both life and art. And if at first his severity offends we will turn to him again and again and find in his strangeness something restful; for his severity is the self-restraint of a man who will not be deceived, who, while looking everywhere for visions of tender- ness and beauty, refuses to shut his eyes to the facts.26

Yeats ends his essay by making one of his favorite points: he criticizes the doctrine of art for art's sake and the flu- ency of trained techniques-school-learned facility where skill of performance surpasses content. Sloan is held forth as the model of the artist.

As the years passed, the Yeats children continued to look for their father's return. Elizabeth wrote to Sloan from her Cuala Press workshop near Dublin, on April 3, 1914: "It is splendid that my father is so well in New York-we wish we had him home here-but a man should be where he is most happy-and so there is nothing to be said-"27 Four months later, World War I swept over Eu- rope, and safe transit back to Ireland became impossible. JBY stayed on, and John Quinn undertook to subsidize him by buying WBY's manuscripts, the money for which went to defray JBY's expenses.

In January 1915 Yeats was hit on the street by a car, receiving a cut on the temple which affected his eyesight. He moved in temporarily with the Sloans until he re- covered, and Dolly took up the pursuit of the law case and began the task of setting up a lecture for JBY to give. In April she gave him its proceeds-over the years there are numerous notes from her to Quinn regarding suitable dates and places for Yeats to talk, what invitations are to be sent, what the costs will be-and he used the sum to

pay his bill with the Petitpas. Meanwhile, Yeats wrote to

Quinn, they had invited him to join them at their summer retreat in Gloucester-an invitation he never took up -with the promise of a lecture there as well.

By the end of April, 1916-having tried in an earlier letter to get Quinn to buy a painting of Sloan's-Yeats offered an evaluation:

Yesterday I saw a collection of Sloans pictures on W 27th St. it refreshed my spirits 8c revived all of my former belief in him as the best painter-any where.--I would select him as the champion of the school of painting which is now in retreat but which will return-&S his progress is wonderful.-he is a man who will never stay still-has an increasing curiosity an unsleeping ambition-in his works is a sort of tragic note. whether a landscape or figures-since it somewhat repells--28

In May, 1916, Jack Yeats suffered a nervous break- down, from which he contemplated a year's slow re- covery. His father, on the other hand, was variously busy -lectures, sketches, portrait commissions from the wealthy, the eternal self-portrait for Quinn, short stories he was sending off to Willie for criticism, articles for several magazines, public readings of his poet-son's writings. Toward the end of the year he began the play he had

293



talked about years before to the Sloans. He wrote Quinn on June 3, 1917: "My play was completed yesterday.... I am sure of it-it has a beginning a middle & an end-a

complete unity-organic throughout--This is good work."29 In that same month, his daughters' Cuala Press

published his first book, four hundred hand-set copies of

Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats, edited by Ezra Pound. The new author was justly proud; he was 78

years old. Nevertheless aspects of the loneliness and despair

which Sloan had long since noted emerged on occasion.

JBY wrote to Quinn on June 19:

... The fact is I am a born sketcher. 8c can even sketch quicker with the paint brush than with pencil-but I must be content with the second best. The half truth is better than the whole truth-I must resign all hope of painting a Mona Lisa or of Watkins Titian or Rembrandt--It is sad now in the ma- turity of health and [illegible] to give way to despair, but I do -let the axe fall---30

His mind remained alert even if sometimes despondent. In late 1917 he was reading and very impressed by James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; he had known Joyce slightly in Dublin. In the following year Quinn began to underwrite Yeats's proposed autobiography, at a pound per thousand words-a project which

only rarely engaged the old man's attention. In the great influenza epidemic of 1918, Yeats took ill. Quinn, himself the victim of intestinal cancer, pleaded with Yeats's children to bring their father home-a plea he made more and more strongly, now that the war was over at last.

Though increasingly deaf, Yeats retained his other

physical faculties and remained one of the most gifted conversationalists of his time. In 1916, George Bellows had done an etching, Artists' Evening, which showed

JBY, Robert Henri, and Bellows himself standing talking in the crowded Petitpas dining room. Three years afterwards, when Bellows was with friends, someone spoke of

Petitpas':

At the mention of Petitpas' he added: "When you go there you will probably see an old man with a white beard sur- rounded usually by several people engaged in talk. This is John Butler Yeats, father of W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet. In his prime he was a great portrait painter. George Moore says he's the greatest conversationalist he ever met. I think so. Go up and introduce yourself to him and tell him I told you to. You'll probably have a fine evening with the old man if he's feeling fit."31

Repeatedly now Yeats fought off his daughters' renewed entreaties to come home. He made $200 lecturing in May, 1919, and used the money to pay his overdue bill for room and board. Dolly Sloan pried sketches out of him, so she could sell them and put the money toward his

expenses. "Artists," he had once written to Sloan, "are like wealthy noblemen who own many castles which they occupy from time to time but never permanently."32 His own castles included the self-portrait, which he kept as-

J. B. Yeats, Self-portrait, 1920, ink on paper.

suring Quinn would be a great work, the centerpiece of his collection, and a full-scale portrait of Celestine Petit-

pas which, he wrote to his daughter Lily, was "a master-

piece ... far and away the best portrait I have painted."33 In April, 1920, his daughters' press issued Further

Letters of John Butler Yeats. (Another publisher had

printed Essays Irish and American in 1918.) In his first volume of 1917 he had drawn a sketch of Dolly Sloan on a blank page in his presentation copy to the artist and his wife, with the inscription: "To John Sloan, in my estima- tion a man of genius."34 Now, he drew a masterly self-

portrait in ink, with a pose reminiscent of that in the

large canvas meant for Quinn. In spite of age, his letters flowed out to the Sloans.

To Dolly, June 19, 1917: "You are the wife of a man of heart and a man of genius-a man always interesting, with whom it is always a pleasure to associate. .. . Re- member no one can help you [in your personal difficul-

ties]-you must lean on yourself-you must work out your own salvation."35 To John Sloan, October 11 or 12, 1917: "An artist is exactly like a man in love-his first love, when there are no doubts of himself or of women to pre- vent his entire abandonment to the passion. A man in love is necessarily a creative artist."36 And on February 21, 1920:

I have been to your exhibition, and renewed in full strength all my admiration for your work. There is absolute truth. It is all as true as the word of God-nothing slurred. You have

294



caught what Carlyle called "courage." There is also passion which is intensity of feeling, and there is Beauty, which is feeling turning back on itself and finding its own tranquility and harmony, and there is power-that is everything is done with masterly ease. Yet let me criticize ....37

And so he does, pointing out Sloan's difficulties, the result of his lack of intensive early formal training, in mod-

elling hands and ankles. Another factor had now arisen, aside from Yeats's

own intent, to keep him in America. The Irish situation had changed. It was the desperate time of the Troubles, and Elizabeth Yeats wrote Sloan on June 10, 1921:

I am glad that you sometimes see our Father-he is a wonderful man. I wish he wasn't so far away-but life here is really a life of great strain now-& it gets worse & worse-no one's life seems safe . .. & our nights even out here [in the Dublin suburbs] are disturbed by constant shooting-some nights we have heard a machine gun firing close here-- ... it is all horrible--38

In addition to his deafness, the influenza bout, and his increasing unsteadiness on his feet, Yeats's last teeth had to be removed, and it was Sloan who had to get the dentist and Quinn who had to pay the bill. The owner-

ship of the boarding-house changed, and Yeats was dissat- isfied with the Swiss couple who took over from the sisters Petitpas. Increasingly he played an intricate game of hesitation: now he would go, now he wouldn't. Time and

again Quinn bought his ship-passage to Ireland; time and again Yeats changed ships and sailing dates. Ulti-

mately he would cash in each ticket, with Quinn acced-

ing in the act. The delay infuriated the sick and impa- tient Quinn; on January 21, 1921, he wrote to Ezra

Pound in London:

You don't or won't remember that I have old man Yeats on my back; that I have tried for weeks to get him to go back; that that meant taking him to doctors, seeing him, paying his bills, writing letter after letter to Yeats, calling to W. B. Y., writing to the sisters, receiving letters, reading letters, grown- ing [sic] when I got letters from them. That done is enough for a man that has got as many things to do as I have.39

Seemingly resigned at last to departure, Yeats wrote to Lily what the attraction of New York was: "a chance of work-of employment. Anything may turn up here-a lecture an article a portrait. It is a high gaming table

where the poorest has a welcome and a chance."40 By Oc- tober 10, 1921, he wrote her: ". .. The portrait is now my comfort and no longer my care. ... I became [over the

summer] an old man .. . [but] the portrait looks well."41

That autumn he had written and spoken debates with

WBY and Quinn, and both the younger men gave in to

letting JBY do what he wanted. What he wanted, for rea-

sons physiological and deeply psychological, was to stay where he was.

To the very end he kept writing to Sloan. On Janu-

ary 9, 1922, there is the last of these letters that has been

preserved:

Your early admiration for Eakins is your misdoing. He modelled a head well when the light fell on it-the dark side is always opaque, that is brown and dulled. Rembrandt's dark and shadowy faces are luminous through and through, show-

ing modelling everywhere. Your dark and heavy coloring is alien to people's minds,

and stops the purchaser.42

At the same time, The Freeman in its issue of Janu-

ary 4, 1922, published an essay on Sloan by Yeats, "A

Painter of Pictures." Yeats employed Sloan's work to

make an aesthetic point of his own:

. . There is always drama in Mr. Sloan's pictures.... In these days, painters have become absorbed-not so much in the making of pictures as in discovering some new method of painting. Does there exist a picture by Matisse? ... a painter can not be called an artist if he does not go beyond experi- ment and paint pictures.

Mr. Sloan has found his technique, and paints pictures- multitudes of them. . . 43

It was his final public word about his old and cherished friend.

In the last preserved letter to John Quinn, January 23, 1922, Yeats wrote: "Last night at the Macdowell Club

[reading] I was one of ten poets including Amy Lowell. All of them quite as illustrious as myself ..."44 A few

days afterwards he took sick. Early on the morning of

February 3, 1922, he died in his rented room. With him were Mrs. Jeanne Robert Foster, a writer and editor whom he had known since 1911, and Mme. Jais, who had succeeded as the patronne. His last remark was to Mrs. Foster: "Remember you have promised me a sitting in the morning."45 A sketch of her was on his drawing-pad. On the easel was the perpetually uncompleted self-portrait that Quinn had commissioned eleven years before.

Mary Colum, in the Irish fashion, sat up the next night with the body, and on Sunday, February 5, the funeral

service took place at the Episcopal Church of the Holy

Apostles on Twenty-eighth Street and Ninth Avenue.

John Sloan, who rode with his wife and the Colums in

the first car following the coffin, wrote to the Yeats family to try to express his emotions:

That great man your father is no longer with us; we ex-

pected him to go-not the mysterious journey into the great beyond-we expected him to go home to Ireland but we had an unformed hope he would never go. He has gone, gone easily and with serenity and for me the world can never be the same-the great warm glow has gone. But I should have felt the same had he left for Ireland. He would then have been with you and not with us-now he is with us all....

The church from which he was buried was full of his lovers, about 250 people there (with only 24 hours notice) and they each felt as I did, that they had lost their father- I assure you that my own father's death was not so great a loss to me. I was never so near to him as to John Butler Yeats, we did not understand each other-and had the Puritan standoffishness-no love expressed, all repression-46

Temporary interment was at Woodlawn Cemetery

295



in the Bronx, but in July burial took place in the peace- ful wooded cemetery of the Adirondack village of Ches- tertown, New York. This was due to Mrs. Foster, who- with the help and advice of John Quinn-purchased a

plot adjacent to that of her own family. There John But- ler Yeats ended his pilgrimage. (Ironically, both he and his wife lie under foreign skies; she died of a stroke in 1900 and is buried in the northwest of London. And Wil- lie, who died in the south of France in 1939, was not rein- terred in Ireland until 1948.) Mrs. Foster wrote to a friend in 1967: ".. . I wrote to the Irish Senate to please send a battle ship to take John Butler Yeats to Sligo, I have their reply. They said; 'a member of the family must make the request and that no request had come from the family and that the great old man must remain where he was.' ,47 When she herself died, in 1970, Mrs. Foster was buried in the grave closest to Yeats's. The in-

scription on his stone was written by Willie: "In remem- brance of/John Butler Yeats/of Dublin Ireland/Painter and Writer/Born in Ireland Mar. 16, 1839/Died in N.Y.

City Feb. 3, 1922." After Yeats's death, Sloan's painting of the "great

old man" and his circle was unbought until, in mid-De-

pression 1935, it was purchased by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington for $2,000. (Sloan had asked

$5,000.) In 1971-2 it was selected as one of the pieces to tour the United States with the centennial exhibition of his work; so that today it has been seen, on gallery walls and in reproductions, by hundreds of thousands.

1 John Sloan's New York Scene: from the Diaries, Notes and Correspondence 1906-13, ed. Bruce St. John (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 324. (Here- after cited as NYS.) 2In the summer of 1971, the National Gallery, Dublin-built after Yeats's death-held 34 of his oils and 37 of his sketches and water-colors. The National Portrait Gallery. London, has two of his portraits. In the United States, self-portraits are in the collection of Dartmouth College, North- western University, and Princeton University. 3 Letters from AE, ed. Alan Denson (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1961), p. 65. 4Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (New York: Doubleday, 1947), pp. 232- 233. 5 Ibid., p. 213. GRandolph Edgar, "The Notebook," in The Northwestern Miller (Minne- apolis, Minn.), 5 April 1922, p. 65. T NYS, pp. 338-339. 8Helen Farr Sloan in interview with the author, 6 December 1971. 9 Helen Farr Sloan, letter to the author, 20 December 1971. 0 NYS, p. 418.

1 Interview, 6 December 1971. " NYS, p. 445. " NYS, pp. 445-446. 14 Van Wyck Brooks, An Autobiography (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965), p. 121. 7' John Butler Yeats, "John Sloan Exhibition," Seven Arts, 2, no. 2 (June, 1917), p. 259. 16 John Sloan, Gist of Art (New York: American Artists Group, 1939), p. 227. 17 NYS, p. 529. 's NYS, p. 530. 19 NYS, p. 533. 20 NYS, p. 539. 2 NYS, p. 540. 22 Unpublished letter, 28 July 1912, John Quinn Memorial Collection, Manu- script Division, New York Public Library. (Hereafter cited as JQ Collection.) 23 Unpublished letter, 15 October 1912, JQ Collection. 24 Unpublished letter, 15 October 1913, JQ Collection. 25 John Butler Yeats, "The Work of John Sloan," Harper's Weekly, 58 (22 November 1913), p. 20.

In the 1950's, when an effort was being made to pub- licize a revival of the Petitpas restaurant, a flier was circu- lated showing-without the Corcoran's permission-a small reproduction of the painting together with a misla- belling of almost all of those portrayed. The Gallery ob- jected. In this the museum was supported by a letter from Shaemas O'Sheel. In 1911, O'Sheel had published a first slim book of poems in the manner of the early W. B. Yeats, The Blossomy Bough. One hundred copies were

printed in a limited edition, on vellum, with the reproduction of a small portrait-sketch of the poet facing the

title-page-a romantic young man's head, drawn by John Butler Yeats in 1910. Now O'Sheel wrote to the Corcoran

regarding Sloan's painting: You have noted that "the Old Man" is pictured smoking a

long thin cigar. The bottles on the table are evidently the usual sort of anonymous green bottles in which wine was commonly served in those days at moderate-priced French restaurants; Sloan might have added an historical touch by putting a taller bottle at Mr. Yeats's elbow. It was his custom, after dinner, to order a bottle of French vermouth and two of the cigars known as Pittsburgh stogies-long, thin, inexpen- sive. Vermouth to the rest of the world is an apperatif [sic]. but to John Butler Yeats it was an after-dinner cordial; and the after-dinner conversation, dominated by that incompar- able conversationalist, lasted as long as it took him to drink that whole bottle of vermouth and to smoke those two stogies, slowly and leisurely.48

As it happens, the wine in the bottles in John Sloan's painting is red. The truth of fact is not necessarily the truth of art.

26Ibid., p. 21. 27 Unpublished letter, Elizabeth Yeats to John Sloan, Sloan Collection, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware. (Hereafter cited as Sloan Collection.) 28 Unpublished letter, John Butler Yeats to John Quinn, 29 April 1916, JQ Collection. 29 Unpublished letter, John Butler Yeats to John Quinn, 3 June 1917, JQ Collection. 30 Unpublished letter, John Butler Yeats to John Quinn, 19 June 1917, JQ Collection. 31 Charles H. Morgan, George Bellows: Painter of America (New York: Reynal & Co., 1965), p. 226. 32 Unpublished letter, John Butler Yeats to John Sloan, 11 January 1916, Sloan Collection. 33 John Butler Yeats, Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others 1869-1922, ed. Joseph Home (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), p. 272. 34 In the Sloan Collection. 33 Unpublished letter, manuscript division, Princeton University Library. 86 Unpublished letter, manuscript division, Princeton University Library. 3T Unpublished letter, manuscript division, Princeton University Library. 38 Unpublished letter, Elizabeth Yeats to John Sloan, 10 June 1921, Sloan Collection. 39 Unpublished letter, John Quinn to Ezra Pound, 21 January 1921, JQ Collection. 40 John Butler Yeats, Letters to His Son ..., p. 273. The letter is dated 19 February 1921. 41 Unpublished letter, JQ Collection. 42 Unpublished letter, JQ Collection. 43 John Butler Yeats, "A Painter of Pictures," The Freeman (4 January 1922), pp. 401-402. 44 Unpublished letter, JQ Collection. 45 Quoted in John Butler Yeats, Letters to His Son . . , p. 289. 46 Quoted in Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 677. 47 To Mrs. Mark H. Fish, Curator, Museum of Local History, Chester- town, N.Y. The letter is dated 12 April 1967. 48 Unpublished letter to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 10 December 1952.

296



Date post:	23-Jan-2017
Category:	Documents
Upload:	robert-gordon
View:	223 times
Download:	4 times

John Sloan and John Butler Yeats: Records of a Friendship

Documents