Susan Mary Yeats Paintings & Artwork for Sale | Susan Mary Yeats Art Value Price Guide

Jun. 01, 2022
Susan Mary 'Lily' Yeats (1866-1949) Lake Isle of Innisfree Embroidery, 64 x 44.5cm (25¼ x 17½'') Signed Provenance: The artist's family; their sale, Sotheby's, London 27/9/2017, lot no.135. Written in 1888 and first published in 1890, W.B. Y
Est: €4,000 - €6,000
Susan Mary 'Lily' Yeats (1866-1949) Lake Isle of Innisfree Embroidery, 64 x 44.5cm (25¼ x 17½'') Signed Provenance: The artist's family; their sale, Sotheby's, London 27/9/2017, lot no.135. Written in 1888 and first published in 1890, W.B. Yeats' 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' brought the poet to international attention and established his fame. The main theme of the poem speaks of a longing for a simpler life in Innisfree and engagement with nature and beauty. The Lake Isle of Innisfree I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnights all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnets wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep hearts core. W.B.Yeats
Adam's
Jun. 01, 2022
Susan Mary (Lily) Yeats (1866-1949) Fisa Playing his Harp, (after a design by Boris Anrep) Cloth embroidered with coloured silks and wool, 96 x 74cm (38 x 28) Cuala Industries label verso, inscribed in Lily Yeats hand, Anrep, Fisa Playing his H
Est: €5,000 - €8,000
Susan Mary (Lily) Yeats (1866-1949) Fisa Playing his Harp, (after a design by Boris Anrep) Cloth embroidered with coloured silks and wool, 96 x 74cm (38 x 28) Cuala Industries label verso, inscribed in Lily Yeats hand, Anrep, Fisa Playing his Harp, worked by Lily Yeats, not for sale, copies 15 gns. Lent by W.B. Yeats, and further inscribed upper centre in the poets hand, W.B. Yeats, 82 Merrion Square. With a later label, Please return to Anne Yeats. Exhibited: Arts & Crafts Society of Ireland 1925, no. 236, where the design is attributed to Von Anrep, executed by Lily Yeats. Provenance: W.B. Yeats, to Anne Yeats; Her sale, H.O.K. 19/11/2002 lot 579, (illus. in catalogue), where bought by current owner. Fisa Playing his Harp shows a male and a female figure standing in front of a branching tree (the harp) under a crowned eagle, with a skull and other symbols below. Probably commissioned by W.B. Yeats from his sister, perhaps using some of his Nobel Prize money (1923). Fisa or Fiza is a popular Muslim name meaning the God of the wind. Boris Anrep (1883-1969), born in Russia, made his name in London as a mosaic artist, with large-scale works at the National Gallery, Westminster Cathedral and the Bank of England. He also produced mosaic panels of St. Anne and St. Patrick for Christ the King Cathedral in Mullingar. His friends included the poet Anna Akhmatova, the painter Augustus John, members of the Bloomsbury Group and other intellectuals. Many of his smaller works are now in museums.
Adam's
Sep. 27, 2021
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) TREES AT NIGHT, c. 1928
Est: €8,000 - €12,000
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) TREES AT NIGHT, c. 1928 silk embroidery on blue poplin ground inscribed on reverse h:31.50 w:19 in. Presented in a free-standing frame by James Hicks of Dublin, 1928. The artist Jack B. Yeats said in an interview that 'there is only one art and that is the art of living' and that within this 'painting is an occupation'. A gifted painter, his siblings were similarly gifted in their own chosen occupations, William in literature, Elizabeth in printing and, as exampled here, Lily in embroidery. The Yeats sisters originally moved to Dublin from London to join Evelyn Gleeson in her newly established arts and crafts enterprise, Dun Emer Workshops in 1902, where the printing of high-quality books and prints was overseen by Elizabeth and embroidery by Lily. The enterprise was named after Cúchulainn's wife Emer who was renowned for her artistic skills, particularly needlework. However, after an acrimonious split with Gleeson, the sisters established Cuala Industries in 1908 taking their own areas of production with them. The ideology of both organisations was espoused in the original Dun Emer prospectus, which stated its desire to 'make beautiful things' using honest and native materials in 'the spirit and tradition of the country'. Both were female enterprises and almost exclusively employed and trained young women as assistants in arts and crafts. Cuala was a Yeats family endeavour and it provided an outlet for each of their occupations but it was only in embroidery that the four siblings converged. Some of William's poems were interpreted in needlework and Lily, Elizabeth and Jack provided designs worked by Lily and her assistants. Before moving to Dublin, she had established herself as a skilled artistic embroiderer working for six years in the late 1800s with May Morris, daughter of William Morris, in their world-renowned Arts and Crafts scheme. The output from May Morris's workshop was admired by many, including George Bernard Shaw, for its marvellously shimmering silky texture, an effect Lily Yeats, the embroidery workshop's most experienced assistant, took with her and incorporated in this Cuala piece. Lily was a regular prize winner at the Tailteann and Arts and Crafts Society exhibitions in Dublin. Cuala exhibited all their wares at various national and international arts and crafts exhibitions. Her embroidered pictures were exhibited as individual art works, examples of which are in the National Gallery of Ireland, and incorporated into fire screens and folding screens, such as The Four Seasons in the National Museum of Ireland, inset with four embroidered landscapes. It should be noted that Lily Yeats was represented in the first international exhibition of Irish art organised by the new Irish Free State in January 1922, 'Exposition D'Art Irlandais' in Paris with seven exhibits and at the first State transatlantic exhibition, 'A Century of Progress Irish Art Exhibition 1933', held in Chicago with five embroideries. The current work, a translucent moonlit woodland scene foregrounded by a wild meadow on her trademark blue poplin background is typical of her output and larger than most of her known pieces. The frame is by James Hicks (1866-1936), the most accomplished Irish cabinetmaker of his time. Dr. Billy Shortall, August 2021.
Whyte's
Mar. 22, 2021
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) LANDSCAPE AT NIGHT
Est: €3,000 - €5,000
signed lower right
Whyte's
Sep. 16, 2019
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) EMBROIDERED PANEL, FISA PLAYING HIS HARP
Est: €8,000 - €12,000
With Cuala Industries label to verso, inscribed [Fisa Playing his Harp, worked by Lily Yeats, not for sale, copies 15 gns] in Lily Yeats' hand and signed [W.B. Yeats, 82 Merrion Square] rear upper right in the poet's hand; Also with a later label inscribed [Please return to Anne Yeats].
Whyte's
Mar. 04, 2019
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) BENBULBEN, 1895
Est: €2,000 - €3,000
signed and dated [Sept] lower right
Whyte's
Apr. 24, 2018
YEATS, LILYAutograph letter signed by Lily Yeats at, Dundrum, Dublin, dated February 9th, 1916. Two pages quarto. Written to her aunt Alice, an interesting letter in which she discusses the Pollexfen family history, when her mother came to Sligo.
Est: €80 - €120
YEATS, LILYAutograph letter signed by Lily Yeats at, Dundrum, Dublin, dated February 9th, 1916. Two pages quarto. Written to her aunt Alice, an interesting letter in which she discusses the Pollexfen family history, when her mother came to Sligo. She also discusses the Abbey Theatre, Mr. Bodkin and some family friends. In fine condition. Susan Mary Lily Yeats (1866-1949) was a sister of William Butler Yeats and Jack Yeats. An embroiderer, she became involved in the Arts and Crafts movement in London, working as assistant to May Morris. Returning to Dublin in 1900, she and her sister Elizabeth joined Evelyn Gleeson in the Dun Emer crafts studio, where she ran the needlework section. In 1908 she founded the embroidery department of Cuala Industries, with which she was involved until its dissolution in 1931. She is known for her embroidered pictures.
Adam's
Sep. 27, 2017
SUSAN MARY 'LILY' YEATS | Three Embroideries
Est: £3,000 - £5,000
embroidery
Sotheby's
Sep. 27, 2017
SUSAN MARY 'LILY' YEATS | Benbulbin, 1895
Est: £1,000 - £1,500
watercolour
Sotheby's
Sep. 27, 2017
SUSAN MARY 'LILY' YEATS | The Proud and Careless Notes Live On
Est: £1,500 - £2,500
embroidery
Sotheby's
Sep. 27, 2017
SUSAN MARY 'LILY' YEATS | The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Silver Apples of the Moon
Est: £1,500 - £2,500
embroidery
Sotheby's
Sep. 27, 2017
SUSAN MARY 'LILY' YEATS | Lake Isle of Innisfree
Est: £1,500 - £2,500
Embroidery
Sotheby's
Feb. 27, 2017
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) LANDSCAPE AT NIGHT
Est: €3,000 - €5,000
signed lower right
Whyte's
Sep. 29, 2008
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) TWO MAGPIES
Est: €5,000 - €7,000
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) TWO MAGPIES ON A STONE WALL, c. 1934 signed lower right silk embroidery on blue poplin ground 25 by 35cm., 10 by 13.75in. Provenance: Given as a wedding present by the Yeats family to the present owner's parents, William S.J. Carter (who knew Jack Yeats when he read law at Trinity College, Dublin) and Dorothy L. Mowbray, on their marriage in July 1934 Literature: Nicola Gordon Bowe and Elizabeth S. Cumming, The Arts and Crafts Movements in Dublin and Edinburgh, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1998, reproduced on front cover; Gifford Lewis, 'Rediscovered Embroideries by Lily Yeats', Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 1998, vol. 14, pp 147-50 Lily Yeats first worked this distinctive design by her brother, the painter and graphic illustrator Jack Yeats, c.1910 in a version which remained in the Yeats' family collection until Anne Yeats' recent death. Before she and her sister Elizabeth ('Lolly') set up their independent Cuala Industries in 1908 in Churchtown, in the foothills of the Dublin mountains, both her brother and sister provided designs for Lily Yeats to execute. These she interpreted with the embroidered skills she had learnt and eminently practised during the six years she worked with William Morris's daughter, May, in London. In 1894, she left the Morris workshop and soon began exhibiting her own embroidered pieces, mostly focussing on artistically stylized flower compositions. The bold black lines delineating the stones in the foreground wall are reminiscent of the strongly graphic treatment Jack Yeats gave the sodality banner saints he designed for his sister to embroider for St. Brendan's Cathedral, Loughrea, Co. Galway. These were worked in the embroidery workshop she was invited to set up in 1902 by Evelyn Gleeson at her Dun Emer Guild in Dundrum, Co. Dublin. There she taught local, untrained girls a wide range of expressive stitches to emphasize the compositional and textural elements in the work they produced. Some pieces were framed, some incorporated into cushions, table or bed linen or furnishings, and some into clothing. Many were sold at nationalist art fairs and arts and crafts exhibitions in Dublin, London and New York, or given as presents far and wide. Although some Cuala designs were reworked a number of times, such as this, of which there are at least three known versions (see Yeats collection, National Gallery of Ireland), each slightly different in their colouring and use of stitches, they are still rare, particularly with such a direct provenance. Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe Dublin, August 2008
Whyte's
Apr. 28, 2008
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) STILL LIFE
Est: €800 - €1,000
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) STILL LIFE OF FLOWERS, MAY 1895 signed and dated lower right watercolour 25 by 17cm., 10 by 6.5in.
Whyte's
Apr. 28, 2008
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) PEONIES AND
Est: €3,000 - €5,000
Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) PEONIES AND PLUMS; AN EMBROIDERED CUSHION SQUARE WITH SILK TASSELS silk threads on silk and linen fabric signed lower right; Cuala Industries label on reverse 53 by 53cm., 21 by 21in. Provenance: By descent from the artist's cousin, Rupert Gordon (1894-1961) to present owner With a family letter dated 22 September 1952 regarding the cushion cover and three related news clippings included with lot. It is unusual to be able to document an early piece of embroidery by Lily Yeats once she had returned to Dublin in 1902, after the six years she spent working in the embroidery workshop run by William Morris's daughter, May, which she had been invited to join in 1888. This piece appears to have originally belonged to Dr. Rupert Gordon, the son of Frances Armstrong ('Fannie') Yeats, the sister of John Butler Yeats, father of Lily, W. B., Jack and Elizabeth ('Lolly') Yeats. Fannie Yeats married Dr. Samuel Thomas Gordon, Vice-President of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, and Surgeon in the Royal Irish Constabulary. Rupert Gordon was therefore a first cousin of Lily Yeats. May Morris' embroidery shop was originally based in her father William Morris' Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, and then, after her marriage in 1890, was run from Hammersmith Terrace, close to the Yeats' family's London house in Bedford Park. Although Lily Yeats had been glad to be able to earn a wage by working on distinguished designs by Morris (who often visited the shop), Henry Dearle, and other luminaries of the Arts and Crafts movement, Murphy records that May Morris "seldom did any work herself but supervised the girls, who never completed a curtain or bedspread but simply began the needlework for wealthy women who purchased the designs" from her. Parry, however, states that the success of the venture was due to "May's hard work designing, embroidering and supervising the work", and to her underrated "skills and use of satin stitches", which gave "a marvellously shimmering silky texture, an effect described by George Bernard Shaw, a great admirer, as 'glowing fruit-forests'". Lewis quotes Lily Yeats: "What we did was to start [beautiful] work for great ladies who probably never finished it. We worked an inch or two of ground, half a flower, a leaf and a bit of stem". May Morris's authoritative book, Decorative Needlework (1893), served as a valuable guide for amateur embroiderers and for those who collected her fashionable workshop's completed designs. That year, the four-poster bed hanging William Morris had asked her to embroider for his Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire was exhibited with the English Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. By then, Lily Yeats had become the most experienced assistant working there, working alongside the actress Florence Farr (wife of Emery Walker), Mary de Morgan, sister of the potter William, and other distinguished designer/craftsmen's wives. The following year, she resigned from the workshop, and in 1895, she exhibited "an embroidered mantle" border at the first exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland. May Morris' influence is clear here, in the centralised, sinuous design, the rhythmic disposition of flowerheads, fruits, leaf stems and thorny stemmed arabesques which anchor the composition. The design also resembles the cushion covers or firescreen panels, designed earlier, between 1878 and 1885, which Parry states "became the financial mainstay" of the embroidery section of Morris & Co., and were as often the designs of Henry Dearle and May Morris as of Morris himself. A much more accomplished design in the formalised floriated mode than any other that has so far come to light by Lily Yeats, it is particularly interesting that it is clearly signed by her (in orange silk thread, in the distinctive manner which demarcated all her own work once she returned to live in Dublin). Its scale of design is smaller and more intricate than the large (filled) cushion which appears in the foreground of the well-known 1903 photograph of Lily Yeats and her girls in the Embroidery Room at Dun Emer. The fact that it is a cushion cover, in perfect (seemingly unused) condition, and not an embroidered version of a design by her brother Jack, her sister Elizabeth, or other friends, family and fellow artists (not even Walter Crane, mentioned in the attached letter of 1952), or one of her later 'Abbey' pictures, 'Garden' firescreens or embroidered decorations for clothes and domestic items, makes it of particular and rare interest. Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe April 2008
Whyte's