John Butler Yeats was born at Tullylish, County Down in Ireland on 16 March 1839. He was the son of a Church of Ireland rector. He was educated at Atholl Academy on the Isle of Man, then under by all accounts, a brutal regime. Two of his schoolmates were Charles and George Pollexfen. He then went on to read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he sparkled and became a member of the University Philosophical Society. He married Susan Mary Pollexfen in Sligo in 1863. He failed to enter the Church for which he had originally been intended, turning instead to the study of law at King’s Inns. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1866 and devilled for Isaac Butt, before taking up painting in 1867. He then moved to London to study at Heatherley’s School of Art, although he was warned by an aunt ‘here you are somebody, there you will be nobody at all.’ He later studied at the Slade, forming friendships with John Trivett Nettleship and Edwin J Ellis, admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. For the first 20 years of his career, Yeats produced illustrations and genre and landscape paintings: Pippa Passes (1869-72; National Gallery, Dublin), a large gouache, is distinctly Pre-Raphaelite in feel. In the late 1880s he began to realise his gifts as a portrait painter, although his production was hampered by a lifelong inability to complete commissions on time. He was an admirer of George Frederick Watts and saw a similarity between Watts’s approach to portrait painting and his own. In an essay on Watts written in 1906, Yeats wrote: ‘the best portraits will be painted where the relationship of the sitter and the painter is one of friendship’. He continually moved his family between Dublin and London in the 1870s and 1880s. However, he had a poor head for business and was never financially secure. He exhibited works at both the RA and the RHA. Yeats was the father of four surviving children. Among them were the poet William Butler Yeats and Jack Butler Yeats, the painter and illustrator who holds the title of Ireland’s most famous and most expensive artist. In the 1880s and early 1890s the Yeats family lived an impoverished, somewhat Bohemian existence at Bedford Park, London. After some years of poor health, Susan Yeats died in 1900. Yeats’ platonic relationship of ten years standing with Rosa Butt then blossomed. In December 1907, at the age of 69, he accompanied his daughter Susan Mary ‘Lily’ to an embroidery exhibition at Madison Square Gardens in New York City, for what was initially intended to be a short visit. However, Yeats remained there for 14 years and never returned to Dublin.  In New York, he was friendly with members of the ‘Ashcan School’ of painters and continued to paint portrait commissions. He also wrote essays for Harper’s Weekly, which were collected in ‘Essays Irish and American’. Within his circle of artistic friends in New York, he was renowned as a conversationalist and was a gifted public speaker. During his time there, he nurtured friendships with Martha Fletcher Bellinger, the writer Van Wyck Brooks, George Bellows, Mary Tower Lapsley Caughey, the miniature painter Eulabee Dix, the painter John Sloan and his wife Dolly Ann Squire and most importantly of all, the corporate lawyer and art patron, John Quinn (1870-1924). The Irish-American Quinn looms large in the story of the Yeats family at that time, principally for his prodigious generosity and tender solicitude. Yeats maintained contact with his family in Europe and friends in America through extensive correspondence. After brief illness, occasioned by long walk in the cold, Yeats died on 3 February 1922 and was buried in Chestertown Rural Cemetery in Chestertown, New York. His autobiography Early Memories: A Chapter of Autobiography was published posthumously. Over a period of half a century, Yeats produced fewer than 100 oil paintings, his greatest output being pencil drawings. There are few records of Yeats’ sales and there is no catalogue of his work in private collections, it also possible that some of his early work may have been destroyed in the Blitz. It is clear that he had no trouble getting commissions, as his sketches and oils may be found in private homes in Ireland, England and America. His later portraits show great sensitivity to the sitter. Yeats is probably best-known for his portrait of the young William Butler Yeats which is one of a number of his pictures in the Yeats Museum in the National Gallery of Ireland. His portrait of John O’Leary (1904) is considered to be his masterpiece.