Portrait of Jennie Mitchell by John B. Yeats (1839-1922)

Portrait of Jennie Mitchell

Date: 1892
Dimensions: 15.5 × 21cm
Medium: Pencil
Collection: Niland Collection
Provenance: Gift of Mrs. V. Franklin in 1959

Description

Jennie Mitchell was the younger sister of Susan Mitchell, the poet and writer whose portrait John B. Yeats later painted. Jennie got to know the Yeats family several years before her sister when she traveled with Lily Yeats on a boat from Ireland to England in 1890. She spent the next two years in Germany and Austria and on her way back to Ireland she visited the Yeats family in London. This drawing of her was made at this time. She was twenty-four years old. Yeats, who sketched his many guests, presents Jennie as a confident young woman. Her face with an open and frank expression is turned towards the artist in a natural and relaxed pose. Jennie had been brought up in Sligo and this common interest may have helped her to become a good friend of the Yeats sisters. In later life she published a number of stories and was a companion to her sister Susan. This drawing was presented to Sligo by their sister, Victoria Franklin in 1959.

Written by Roisin Kennedy

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About the Artist

John Butler Yeats (1839 – 1922)

Born 1839, Tullyish, County Down, Ireland. Died 1922, New York, United States. John Butler Yeats (JBY), father of William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939), Jack B. Yeats (1871 – 1957), Susan Mary (Lily) Yeats (1866 -1948), and Elizabeth Corbet (Lolly) Yeats (1868-1940) was born at Tullyish, County Down. John was the son of a Church of Ireland rector, the Reverend W. B. Yeats. John was educated at a preparatory school in Liverpool and then in the Isle of Man subsequently graduating at the age of twenty three, with honours and a prize in political economy from Trinity College, Dublin. In 1862, at the age of twenty four, he married Susan Pollexfen (1841 – 1900), the daughter of a Sligo ship merchant, whose family originated from Cornwall. Soon after his marriage he began to study for the Irish Bar, to which he was called in 1866, but his efforts to earn a living in this field proved difficult and he abandoned law to become a professional painter instead. To this end, Yeats set out for London, enrolling at Heatherley’s Art School. From 1868, onwards he moved backwards and forwards between England and Ireland devoting more and more of his time to portraiture and setting out to capture everyone who interested him, particularly the leading political figures, writers and talkers of the day. He exhibited regularly at the R.H.A. and helped stage an exhibition of Whistler’s work at the Dublin Sketching Club in 1884. He was elected a member of the R.H.A. in 1892. In 1901, the R.H.A. rejected his work but his luck turned when Sarah Purser organised a joint retrospective exhibition of paintings by Nathaniel Hone and himself in the same year. For Yeats it was a pivotal moment. Hugh Lane saw his forty-four pictures on display and commissioned the artist to paint a series of portraits of significant figures in Irish cultural life. John Butler Yeats travelled with his daughter Lily to New York in 1907 ostensibly for a short visit. After several months Lily returned to Ireland without her father who remained in New York for the rest of his life. Without any regular income the elderly Yeats led a precarious existence and relied on the support and friendship of his admirers in America. John Quinn, the Irish-American lawyer and collector, was undoubtedly the most significant of these.

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