Date: 1903
Dimensions: 14.5 × 9.5cm
Medium: Pencil and watercolour on paper
Collection: Niland Collection
Provenance: Lent by Ms Kathleen Goodfellow in 1971, and later presented to the collection.

Description:

The tiny dimensions of this work indicate that it was probably originally a page from one of the Yeats’s pocket-sized sketchbooks. Its humorous image shows a donkey ‘kissing’ a foal. Yeats his inscribed it ‘G’morrow Strawberry’, the typical sort of droll comment given by the artist to his sketches. Yeats presented the work to the poet and editor of the Dublin Magazine, Seamus O’Sullivan in 1945. He gave away a number of his early sketchbooks and drawings to friends and supporters at this time. He may have decided to give this particular painting to O’Sullivan as Yeats’s scrapbook of newspaper cuttings reveal that O’Sullivan had referred to it as ‘irresistible’ in a review in the United Irishman some forty years previously.

Written by Roisin Kennedy