Jack Butler Yeats was one of the most important expressionist Irish artists of the twentieth century. His subject matter often depicted landscapes, gypsies and Celtic mythology, and he applied his paint thickly with visible palette knife marks. Yeats was born in 1871 in London, England but grew up in Sligo, Ireland. He went back and forth between London and Dublin as he attended various art schools in London. In 1897 he moved to Devon, but in 1910, he returned to Ireland, living in Wicklow and finally Dublin.

Yeats began his painting career using the medium of watercolour, but switched to oil around 1906. His early paintings were more conservative, and his typical subject matter was romantic and realistic portrayals of urban and rural life in Ireland. In the 1920s his painting style underwent a major change. He adopted a more colourful palette, and began to paint with free and loose brush-strokes, and his subjects included scenes of circuses, music halls, horse races, landscapes of Ireland’s west coast, and themes from Irish mythology.
His works are in the collections of the National Gallery in Dublin, the Tate Gallery in London, the Ulster Museum in Belfast and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.