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Migrant Travellers and Tourist Idylls: The Paintings of Jack B. Yeats and Post‐colonial Identities
Author(s) -
Cusack Tricia
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.00103
Subject(s) - idyll , irish , colonialism , history , population , gender studies , ethnology , geography , aesthetics , literature , sociology , art , archaeology , philosophy , demography , linguistics
Travellers of various kinds have long been a salient feature of Irish society. Whether tinkers, tramps, seasonal workers or emigrants, they occupied positions outside an increasingly settled and bourgeois population. Their histories are contested and inevitably bound up with colonialism. This article considers how the figures of travellers in landscape depicted in Jack B. Yeats’s paintings of the 1930s–50s might be related to the constitution of national and cultural identities in Ireland in the post‐colonial period. Particular attention is given to Yeats’s own marginal position as Anglo‐Irish. As the representation of landscape, imagined with its `natural’ inhabitants, contributes to the construction of national and cultural identities, colonialism produces contesting, and sometimes ambivalent, representations of the land and its occupants. In a period of social change and ‘re‐positioning’ for both the Irish and Anglo‐Irish, Yeats’s travellers are found to be located within the rural idyll of ‘Gaelic Ireland ’ rather than the rural idyll of anglicized Ireland/England. However, I propose that they do not quite form part of this idyll. Furthermore, the depiction of both travellers and landscape is seen to be ambivalent, questioning the security of Yeats’s relation to the ‘Irishness ’ represented. I suggest that the figure of the traveller cannot be isolated from anti‐modern discourses of poetic wandering originating outside Ireland. Yeats’s landscape represents a touristic idyll marked as ‘Irish ’ but also as Utopian and timeless. The viewer’s imagined occupancy of the role of tourist–traveller in this idyll is disturbed however by Yeats’s depiction of the traveller as unromanticized, poor and migrant. In post‐colonial Irish culture, the figure of the traveller accumulated diverse connotations associated with the needs for identity and identification generated by cultural shifts towards national definition and exclusions, as well as by the ongoing changes of modernity.