Lot 123: Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) TWO MAGPIES

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