41 Jack Butler Yeats RHA 1871-1957 MULDOON & RATTLESNAKE (1928) Oil on canvas, 9" x 14" (23 x 35.5cm), signed.
Exhibited: 1928 London (21); 1965 Waterford (5); 2011 The Model Museum, Sligo – Yeats Outsider Exhibition.
rovenance: Sold to Miss G. Poer O’Shea at the London exhibition in 1928; Private Collection; de Veres, November, 2009; P Private Collection.
L iterature: Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings by Hilary Pyle, No.375 , page 341, Vol I, which states: “A jockey and his mount on Drumcliffe Strand, in Sligo, the rider leaning down to speak to a supporter. Ben Bulben is in the background”.
ike Muldoon was a famous amateur jockey and athlete in Sligo in the late 19th century. He was a farmer from Drumcliffe, M whose successes at the strand races caught the imagination of many Sligomen and women including Jack B. Yeats. His prowess as a sprinter is celebrated in a contemporary ballad, ‘Drumcliffe Races, 1889’ by Martin Walters. Yeats owned a copy and it inspired his watercolour ‘In the Foot Race there are Many to Compete’ (1899, National Gallery of Ireland). Muldoon and Rattlesnake, his steed, were the subject of two other works by Yeats. This 1928 oil painting and a 1901 watercolour. Yeats also noted the name of Muldoon in drawings that he made of Sligo for the Daily Graphic in 1890. Hilary Pyle speculates that Muldoon may have been the inspiration for one of the jockeys depicted in Before the Start (1915, National Gallery of Ireland).
T he strand races is a favourite theme in Yeats’s earliest paintings of Ireland where the excitement of the crowd and the spectacle of the jockeys and horses provide plenty of opportunity for capturing humans and animals at their most entertaining. In ‘Muldoon and Rattlesnake’, the close-up composition brings the viewer near to Muldoon who is on the back of a very animated Rattlesnake. He leans down with arm extended to steady himself on his mount, and to greet those who have come to wish him well in the race. Wearing a green jacket, white breeches and a racing cap, he glances down at one figure on the extreme right-hand side of the composition. The head of another, a young blonde woman, looks on from the left. These two figures open the composition for us the viewers bringing us into the centre of the painting and the action.
eyond this central group, sculpted out of thick blue paint one can decipher (on the right) other jockeys lining up for the B race and flags flying in the breeze. The sea and an outcrop of green land indicates the low lying Sligo coastline while the monumental slope of Ben Bulben dominates the right-hand side of the background. The skies are dark and stormy, adding to the commotion of the occasion. The dark pulsating form of Rattlesnake fills the foreground, his large head raised in an attitude of extreme tension. Painted at least thirty years since Yeats had seen Muldoon, the work vividly recalls through the vitality of its thick application of paint, the experience of a race meeting and the competing sensations of crowds, animals and the light and forms of the Sligo coast. Equally the work is a dramatic piece of painting with thickly sculpted forms and blends of deep colour. Roisin Kennedy, October 2017
Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats. His Watercolours, Drawings and Pastels, Irish Academic Press, 1993, p.109. H. Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings, André Deutsch, 1992, II, no. 375.
€80000 - 120000
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