Jack B. Yeats: Ireland's Painter

JACK B. YEATS
Sea Captain, 1906
watercolor on paperboard
Collection of Brian P. Burns

Sea Captain

This striking watercolor is another study in Yeats's ability to capture an individual character, not so much through physical likeness as through a suggestion of an internal quality. Even without the background of quickly rendered islands and ships, the portrait is unmistakably of a man who has spent his life on, and with, the sea. In his hat and coat of deep, multiple blues, his strong, pale face with its red beard, and his deep-set eyes under a heavy, serious brow, he seems to have assimilated the very elements of the sea: salt, sand, water. Sea Captain depicts an archetypal sailor, an ancient mariner, set apart from earth-bound humanity by his intimate, complex, and internalized realtionship with the volatile sea.