The first Olympic medal ever won by a citizen of this State was secured by the artist Jack B Yeats for Swimming, better-known now as The Liffey Swim, back when paintings inspired by sport were judged at the Games.
Yeats won silver in Paris in 1924, a year after his brother William Butler Yeats became the first Irish person to win a Nobel Prize (for Literature).
The Liffey Swim can be seen at the National Gallery, but its companion entry in the 1924 Olympics, Before The Start (which shows three jockeys before a race) is part of the new Jack B Yeats: Painting & Memory exhibition, which opens at the gallery on Saturday.
Brendan Rooney, head curator at the gallery, said that in preparing the exhibition, marking 150 years since the artist's birth, "we were incredibly well served by lenders". "People, it appears to us, who own a Yeats love Yeats, and that applies to public and private collections. The generosity we experienced was terrific."
He recalled how Yeats produced “over half of his entire output of oil paintings in the last 15 years of his life”. “It’s unbelievable,” he said of Yeats, who died in 1957 aged 85. “In his 78th year he produced and finished 80 paintings. He was incredibly driven.”
National Gallery director Sean Rainbird said the exhibition was originally scheduled for spring of last year, before the pandemic intervened. "You think you know Yeats and actually you find, when you come to an exhibition like this, you make fantastic discoveries. They've done a great job," he said. "It's wonderful for the Irish visitors to actually reintroduce, reacquaint themselves with Yeats."
Rainbird said that because of the pandemic only 4-5 per cent of visitors to the gallery were from abroad, when normally it’d be about 50 per cent. “That’ll come back.” Attendances at the gallery “plummeted”, he said, due to pandemic restrictions, with about 220,000 people visiting last year when in normal times it would have been about 750,000, give or take.
From Monday, visitor numbers can be up to 60 per cent capacity and Mr Rainbird said that “it looks like from the end of October most of the restrictions will be lifted”.
