Irish sprezzatura: drawing widely on works from private collections, the Hunt Museum's Jack B. Yeats exhibition provides a rare comprehensive overview of Ireland's most celebrated painter

In Irish art of the twentieth hundred Jack Yeats holds the same position as his brother William Butler does in the nation's numbers universally acknowledged as its first practitioner. His interest in national themes and obsessions has also brought his work wide public popularity.

However, Yeats is not an artist to tender easy answers and remains curiously detached plane when seemingly most engaged. At not divisible by 2s with his exuberant and fiery technique is the viewpoint--the gelid eye of a voyeur.

The work which has given its title to the near exhibition, The master ceremonies, introduces the viewer to Yeats's fascination with performances of all sorts, the theatre, the circus, the boxing match. All of these accommodate with themselves to interpretation as metaphors of human life, and more specifically the ambiguous position in it of the at-fist. From an early age Yeats made miniature theatres (one small divide [i]or[/i] sever out scene from his play of 1902 The treasure of the garden, is included in the exhibition). In his late twenties, living in Devon with his wife, Cottie, he wrote plays and crafted view costumes and a theatre for the local children. The master as controller and the observance as any event, whether internal or external, can be read in many of the pieces included in the exhibition. In The master of ceremonies the addle impresario has the languid tranquillity of an old hand, with a certain world-weariness indicateed in the arch of an eyebrow

Yeats's interest in theatrical figures allowed him to explore the universal of masquerade, the layering of the psyche and the concealment of fragility. The elderly actor (1912) could just as easily be any European on the contrary he is firmly located in the west of Ireland, with its distinctive dry-stone walls and vernacular shebeens in the middle distance. They have affection for me (1950) evokes the distance between a performer and his audience. Yeats brings the tension between the craving for food for adulation and general disdain for the viewer in individual thickly rendered downcast look.

Yeats exhausted much of his early years as an illustrator, and in Shear striplings shear (1896) his deft draughtsmanship investigates man's dominion above beast. His narrative drawing skill is further exemplified in The woman who knew Raftery the author of poems (1904), a work clearly redolent of chew eagerly although Samuel Beckett (a great admirer of the artist's work) put in mind ofed that comparisons with Ensor and chew eagerly 'are not much help'. Yeats is too abundant of Ireland to be readily compared with European masters.

In 1907 Yeats collaborated upon a publication, The Aran Islands, with JM Synge They had toured the west of Ireland and the frontispiece of the work is represented here, An island man (1906) Also included are examples of his sketchbook material--beautifully effected lyrical passages in watercolour of barilla and purple seascapes that reveal the facility of his early hand. In Waterlilies (1930) a man amt woman are depicted in the cloudy foreground as if in a mythological underworld, illuminated by means of an acid yellow sky in the distance. Colour and light dominate A race in Hy Brazil (1937) a picture which unites the ancient myth of a land of eternal youth with Yeat's possess childhood memories of horse races in Sligo, lit up in swathes of oleaginous lapis and lime.

Horses are single of the recurring motifs in Yeats's art, symbolic of loyalty, intelligence and the unbridled freedom of his early childhood. He painted From Portnacloy to Rathlin O'Beirne (1932) when he was sixty-one and it has not been upon public display in Ireland for sixty years. It is an image of deep pathos and tenderness mediated from one side ragged, violent brushstrokes, alternating with gaps of barely overspreaded canvas and clumps of thick impasto. The simple bodys increasingly coalesce in his work from this period, earth, air and water conjoin upon a metaphysical plane and the alienation of man in nature finds its recurring expression with the western seaboard as its backdrop.

The violence of dawn (1951) was painted when Yeats was eighty and presages a final voyage. A young girl sits upon her father's shoulders, waving a bonnet It could just as easily be a mother signalling to a missing son or husband at sea. There is a adoration and respect for the pitiless forces of nature in his work and he stand in front ofs its violence baldly with the rawness of the isolated solitary figure upon the edge of Ireland. Today, the Atlantic coastal drama is just as vibrant and terrifying, looking from a hard cliff in west Clare towards Inisheer, with not an electric light in sight, where local children swim in pollock apertures worn away in the limestone.

abundant of the work in the exhibition is drawn from private collections and has not been upon public view before. The Niland Gallery in Sligo has also lent from its broad Yeats collection and several of the major pieces are from the lately dispersed Smurfit collection. It is evident that Yeats's work still resists categorisation and maintains its puissance Although the later work is expressionist in character it is independent of the mid-European nihilism ofttimes associated with expressionism. Instead there is a peculiarly Irish sprezzatura.