Lot 30: Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) LANDSCAPE AT NIGHT

signed lower right

h:9.50 w:14.50in.

silk embroidery on blue poplin ground; (framed)

The present work is very close in design, colour and execution to Two Magpies on a Stone Wall, c.1934 which sold through Whyte's on 29 September 2008 as lot 123. In her catalogue note for that work Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe noted:

"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' 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 stylised flower compositions….. These were worked in the embroidery workshop she was invited to set up in 1902 by Evelyn Gleeson at her Dún Emer Guild in Dundrum, Co. Dublin. There she taught local, untrained girls a wide range of expressive stitches to emphasise 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."

A rare and beautiful example of the Yeats' Cuala designs.

LANDSCAPE