The Comic Strip Art of Jack B.

Yeats 1st
Edition Michael Connerty
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-comic-strip-art-of-jack-b-yeats-1st-edition-michael
-connerty/
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

THE COMIC
STRIP ART OF
JACK B. YEATS

Michael Connerty
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Series Editor
Roger Sabin
University of the Arts London
London, UK
This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.”
It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within
Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor
field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to
becoming a nascentdiscipline , the journey has been a hard but spectacular
one. Those capital letters have been earned.
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the
comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and
informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistica-
tion. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars
from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history,
aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital
realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of
60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to
50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include
new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered provo-
cations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t
progress without a little prodding.
Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the
University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An
Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part of the
team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the boards
of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for interna-
tional media, and consults on comics-related projects for the BBC,
Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British Library.
The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels
and Comics Conference.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14643
 Michael Connerty

The Comic Strip Art

of Jack B. Yeats
Michael Connerty
Animation and Visual Culture
Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology
Dublin, Ireland

ISSN 2634-6370     ISSN 2634-6389 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
ISBN 978-3-030-76892-8    ISBN 978-3-030-76893-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
­institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Jack B. Yeats, The Automatic Fire Lighter (Detail), Puck, 14
March 1908

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Hago (Gerard Hagan) who shared his infectious enthusiasm for comics
many moons ago.
 Acknowledgement

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my PhD supervisors at Central

Saint Martins, UAL, Prof. Roger Sabin and Dr. Ian Horton. Their
guidance and good humour were crucial throughout—I could not have
asked for better support. I have had great experiences with the staff at the
Bodleian Library, Oxford; The British Library, London; Oldenburg
University Library; Trinity College Library, Dublin; The National Library,
Dublin; and particularly Pauline Swords and Kathryn Milligan at the Yeats
Archive at the National Gallery, Dublin. I would like to offer warm thanks
to those who have given valuable editorial advice on related texts pub-
lished elsewhere, especially John A. Lent, Benoit Crucifix, Maaheen
Ahmed, Paul Fagan, Tamara Radak, and John Greaney. I am grateful to
The Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust for the generous funding
of research travel. In no particular order I would like to add thanks for
advice, support, and encouraging conversation to Dr. Kevin Carpenter
and Dr. Marcus Free (both trail-blazers in this territory), Dr. Róisín
Kennedy, Dr. Oliver Schoenbeck, Dr. Ian Hague, Prof. Lawrence Grove,
Russ Bestley, Hedwig Schwall, and all at the Irish College in Leuven, Ben
Bethell, Pascal Lefevre, Paul Tumey, Charlie Minter, Guy Lawley, Dr. Tom
Walker, Lance Pettit, Joe Brooker, Susan Schreibman, Barry Anthony,
Christina Meyer, Robert Kirkpatrick, and to Andy Osborn for technical
assistance. Huge thanks to my parents, Vic and Bernie, and, finally, to
Maria, Scott, Rosalie, and Louie.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 A Life of Jack B. Yeats: His Painting, Drawing, and

Illustration Work 15

3 A Brief History of the British Comic Strip 1890–1917 39

4 “Clever Jack B. Yeats”: His Work for Comics and Humour

Periodicals 79

5 Crime, Adventure, and Technology: Sources in Popular

Fiction and Media125

6 Street, Stage, and Circus: Worlds of Performance and

Spectacle187

7 Conclusion: Reassessing Jack B. Yeats as a Comic Strip

Artist247

Bibliography263

Index277

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 A Broad Sheet No. 4 April 1902 26

Fig. 2.2 Jack B. Yeats, The Bosun and the Bob-Tailed Comet pps. 6–7.
(Two images) 29
Fig. 2.3 Jack B. Yeats, A Little Fleet, p. 19 30
Fig. 2.4 Norma Borthwick, Ceacta Beaga Gaedilge, or Irish Reading
Lessons II. (Illustration by Jack B. Yeats) p. 16 32
Fig. 3.1 Front Cover, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday. (Main illustration by
W.F. Thomas), 14 September 1889 42
Fig. 3.2 Vandyke Browne, Mr. Comic Cuts, Comic Cuts, 13 August 1892 49
Fig. 3.3 Tom Browne, Lanky Larry and Bloated Bill (panel), Comic
Home Journal, 19 November 1898 51
Fig. 3.4 Percy Cocking, Racketty Row (panel), The Jester and Wonder,
25 September 1908 53
Fig. 3.5 Unknown artist, Advertisement for Ogden’s Cigarettes, The
Big Budget, 16 October 1897 57
Fig. 3.6 Julius Baker, Comic Cuts Colony, Comic Cuts, 9 July 1910 60
Fig. 3.7 Unknown artist, Illustration for London Life serial, The Jester
and Wonder, 16 August 1902 63
Fig. 3.8 Ralph Hodgson, Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy, The Big Budget,
16 April 1904 67
Fig. 3.9 Unknown artist, Comic Cuts, 20 June 1896 72
Fig. 4.1 Jack B. Yeats, “To Timahoe Says He,” 1885 82
Fig. 4.2 Jack B. Yeats, “History of a Proposal,” 1886 83
Fig. 4.3 Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “Jemmy’s Cricket on the
Hearth,” The Vegetarian, 21 December 1889 85
Fig. 4.4 Jack B. Yeats, Tommy’s Opportune Moment, Ariel, 26
December 1891 89

xi
xii List of Figures

Fig. 4.5 Jack B. Yeats, The Automatic Artist, Chums, 28 December 1892 90
Fig. 4.6 Jack B. Yeats, Families I have Done For, by Mary Jane No. 3:
The Skientific Family (panel), The Comic Home Journal, 8
June 1895 93
Fig. 4.7 Jack B. Yeats, Mrs. Spiker’s Boarders, The Funny Wonder, 2
January 1897 94
Fig. 4.8 Jack B. Yeats, Submarine Society, Lika Joko, 27 October 1894 97
Fig. 4.9 Jack B. Yeats, Squire Brummle’s Experiences, Lika Joko, 16
March 1895 98
Fig. 4.10 Jack B. Yeats, John Duff Pie Takes on Hare and Hound, The
Big Budget, 26 March 1898 100
Fig. 4.11 Jack B. Yeats, Comedy and Tragedy, The Jester and Wonder,
16 June 1906 102
Fig. 4.12 Jack B. Yeats, Roly-Poly, the World’s Champion Barrel-Trotter
in Japan, Comic Cuts, 15 January 1910 108
Fig. 4.13 Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “The Adventures of Nelson
Hardbake—Baffled by Baffles,” The Jester and Wonder, 8
February 1908 110
Fig. 4.14 Jack B. Yeats, New Summer Games with a Strong war Flavour,
Punch, 2 August 1916 116
Fig. 4.15 Jack B. Yeats, Untitled, Punch, 1 December 1915 118
Fig. 5.1 Jack B. Yeats, Detective Chubblock Homes on the Track of
the Spring Poet, The Funny Wonder, 13 February 1897 129
Fig. 5.2 (a) Jack B. Yeats, Chublock Lays a Ghost, Comic Cuts, 5
January 1907; (b) Chublock and the Cigar Thief, Comic Cuts,
12 January 1908 (two images) 135
Fig. 5.3 Jack B. Yeats, “The Adventures of Kiroskewero, the Great
Detective, and Isle of Man, the Hunting Puss Cat,” The Big
Budget, 23 November 1901 137
Fig. 5.4 Jack B. Yeats, Jack Sheppard the Younger and Little Boy Pink
Fight a Duel at the Klondyke, The Big Budget, 26 March 1898 139
Fig. 5.5 Jack B. Yeats, “The Misadventures of Bill Bailey, Private
Detective (illustrated banner),” The Jester and Wonder, 3
December 1904 140
Fig. 5.6 Jack B. Yeats, The Cute Yank Gets Sucked in Once More,
The Funny Wonder, 2 April 1898 141
Fig. 5.7 Jack B. Yeats, Cockney Charles opens Oysters for a Wager,
The Jester and Wonder, 23 September 1905 143
Fig. 5.8 Jack B. Yeats, Convict One One One, the Ticket-of-Leave
Man, Does Skilly and the Rest a Good Turn, The Jester and
Wonder, 4 March 1905 145
 List of Figures  xiii

Fig. 5.9 Jack B. Yeats, Roly-Poly’s Tour Around the World, Comic
Cuts, 7 August 1909 152
Fig. 5.10 Jack B. Yeats, Sandab the Sailor Makes a Watch-Dog into a
Clock-­Dog, Puck, 12 February 1910 155
Fig. 5.11 Jack B. Yeats, Untitled (Sandab the Sailor), Puck, 27 July 1907 156
Fig. 5.12 Jack B. Yeats, The Little Stowaways Did Not Discover the
North Pole, Puck, 7 March 1908 159
Fig. 5.13 Jack B. Yeats, The Two Little Stowaways Give Eagle Beak a
Surprise, Puck, 7 December 1907 161
Fig. 5.14 Jack B. Yeats, “Ephriam Broadbeamer, Smuggler, Pirate and
Other Things,” The Funny Wonder, 30 April 1898 163
Fig. 5.15 Jack B. Yeats, The Log of the Pretty Polly (illustrated banner),
The Jester and Wonder, 11 March 1905 164
Fig. 5.16 Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “The Skull and Crossbones
Club,” The Jester and Wonder, 22 July 1905 165
Fig. 5.17 Jack B. Yeats, The Automatic Firelighter, Puck, 14 March 1908 169
Fig. 5.18 Unknown artist, The Burrowing Machine, The Jester and
Wonder 16 September 1908 170
Fig. 5.19 Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Burrowing Machine, Puck,
2 May 1908 171
Fig. 5.20 Jack B. Yeats, Dicky the Birdman Causes a Flutter of
Excitement, Comic Cuts, 13 August 1910 172
Fig. 5.21 (a) The Adventures of the Who-did-it, Comic Cuts, 21
September 1907; (b) The Adventures of the Who-did-it,
Comic Cuts, 28 September 1907 (two strips) 177
Fig. 6.1 (a) Jack B. Yeats, Carlo the Comical Conjuror and the
Vanishing Brick, The Jester, 15 June 1912; (b) Carlo the
Comical Conjuror has the Swell on the Carpet, The Jester, 6
July 1912 190
Fig. 6.2 Jack B. Yeats, Jimmy Jog the Juggler (Untitled), The Butterfly,
21 March 1914 194
Fig. 6.3 Jack B. Yeats, Jimmy Jog the Juggler Preserves his Nut, The
Butterfly, 20 February 1915 196
Fig. 6.4 Jack B. Yeats, At the Kinetoscope Show, The Funny Wonder,
20 November 1898 197
Fig. 6.5 Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Theatre Royal: Bitter Cold by
I.C. Icle, The Jester and Wonder, 15 February 1908 199
Fig. 6.6 Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Theatre Royal: Charlie’s Aunt—Still
Running, The Jester and Wonder, 25 January 1908 202
Figs. 6.7 (a) Jack B. Yeats, Dicky the Birdman Gives a Star Turn, Comic
Cuts, 14 May 1910; (b) Dicky the Birdman Gets the Drop on
a Bad Boy, Comic Cuts, 4 June 1910 212
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 6.8 Jack B. Yeats, The Brothers Eggbert and Philbert Hold the
Glass up to Nature, The Butterfly, 22 January 1916 213
Fig. 6.9 Jack B. Yeats, Eggbert and Philbert (Untitled), The Butterfly,
2 September 1916 214
Fig. 6.10 Jack B. Yeats, Signor McCoy the Wonderful Hoss, The Big
Budget, 26 June 1897 216
Fig. 6.11 Jack B. Yeats, See Here—How to Run the Big Budget,
The Big Budget, 13 August 1898 217
Fig. 6.12 Jack B. Yeats, Chubblock Homes (panels), Comic Cuts,
7 April 1894 224
Fig. 6.13 Jack B. Yeats, Fandango the Clever Gee-Gee as the Family
Ghost, The Jester and Wonder, 4 March 1905 226
Fig. 6.14 Signor McCoy Scored off the Old Boy, The Big Budget, 14
August 1897 229
Fig. 6.15 Jack B. Yeats, Fandango the Detective Hoss Convicts a
Coiner, The Jester and Wonder, 10 March 1906 230
Fig. 6.16 Jack B. Yeats, Fairo the 2nd the Egyptian Camel. The Darling
is Driven Away, The Funny Wonder, 19 November 1898 231
Fig. 6.17 Jack B. Yeats, Lickity Switch the Educated Monk, The Jester
and Wonder, 12 March 1904 234
Fig. 6.18 Jack B. Yeats, Little Lord Fondlefoo Imitates Lickity Switch
the Educated Monk, and Thereby Hangs a Tale,
The Jester and Wonder, 9 April 1904 235
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A man rests his head in his hand, almost consumed by the thick impasto
strokes of paint that fill the interior of the train carriage in which he
reclines, apparently oblivious to the wild and abstract landscape that we
can see passing by the window behind him. There is a pervasive atmo-
sphere of melancholy and meditation, but also a vitality in the rich applica-
tion of colour. We will have cause to revisit trains and travel narratives over
the course of this text, but for now it’s sufficient to note that this painting,
Reverie (1931), once owned by the revolutionary activist and writer Ernie
O’Malley, and typical of the vividly expressive work produced by Jack
B. Yeats during the latter part of his career, sold at auction in November
2019 for €1.7 million, more than double the guide price.1 At the time of
writing it was just one of many recent indications that Yeats’ stature as one
of the major Irish artists of the twentieth century continues to grow, his
work familiar to a public well beyond the limits of the art world and spe-
cialist history. His landscapes and the enigmatic characters who populate
them have become part of the store of national iconography in the decades
following his death in 1957, appearing regularly in popular print media. In
Ireland, the fact that Jack Yeats produced comic strips at all generally
comes as a surprise to both art historians and admirers of his work, but the
fact that he was extremely prolific, was one of the most famous and suc-
cessful cartoonists of his generation, and produced some of the most

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_1
2 M. CONNERTY

popular characters of early British comics barely seems creditable.2 Faced

with the scale of Yeats’ output, published in comics that sold in the hun-
dreds of thousands every week, over a period of more than twenty-five
years, what is difficult to understand now is how these facts regarding his
career could have been overlooked for so long.
It can be argued that Yeats, during the earlier years of his career, was
primarily a professional comic strip artist, rather than a fine artist who
dabbled in commercial work for purely economic reasons, as is the con-
ventional view. What follows will, in part, amount to a refutation of that
specific contention about Yeats and present his work for the comics as
important and valuable in its own right. There are various social, political,
and cultural reasons for the valorisation of Yeats’ painting, his work in oils
particularly, over the mass marketed comic strips we will be looking at
here. Whether the critical emphasis is placed on the context of Irish nation-
alism or of European modernism, the comics present themselves as an
anomaly, and have not been significantly engaged with up to this point.
His career has almost exclusively been evaluated from an art-historical per-
spective, and his popular, ephemeral output has been relegated to the
periphery, despite the widespread scale of its circulation at the time of
initial publication. It is hoped that what follows can contribute to a
retrieval of this material from the relative obscurity to which it has been
consigned. To do this, it will be necessary to investigate the material from
various perspectives, and thus, while this is first and foremost a work of
Comics Studies, I will be taking the kind of interdisciplinary approach that
characterises much of the field, drawing on (and I hope contributing to)
Irish Studies, media history, and the study of Victorian and Edwardian
popular culture.
There were numerous examples of sequential graphic narrative pub-
lished throughout the nineteenth century and earlier, many of which for-
mally resemble the modern strip. Particularly during the second half of the
century the appearance of such sequences became increasingly common,
not only in the context of print comedy and cartooning, but also, for
example, in popular journalism. Thus, the comic strip was not itself a novel
graphic form in the 1880s, when Yeats began experimenting with it in his
pre-teens. For the purposes of this book, while acknowledging the exis-
tence of important antecedents and precedents, I will be taking the 1890s
as marking an important turning point in the development of the recogni-
sably modern comic strip, and of the ‘comic’ as a specific publishing cate-
gory. This was the decade that saw the arrival in the UK of a new class of
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

cheap publication, which aimed for mass circulation on an unprecedented

scale, targeting a far more generalised readership than the humour peri-
odicals of previous decades. The comics of this period prioritised a particu-
lar type of unsophisticated humorous illustration, increasingly in the form
of the strip as opposed to the single-panel cartoon, ultimately evolving
their own distinctive graphic style, and orienting themselves around recur-
ring characters and knockabout comedy. While aiming to fill gaps in the
critical engagement with publications of the 1890s, including Comic Cuts
(1890–1953) and The Big Budget (1897–1909), it is important to
acknowledge the earlier stages in the evolution of the comic strip, which
have been more extensively covered by scholars.
David Kunzle’s two-volume History of the Comic Strip establishes a
chronological development of the form, beginning in the fifteenth cen-
tury, situating each stage in the cultural and political context of the period.3
The focus of the second volume is mainly on nineteenth-century develop-
ments in France and Germany, but it also contains a chapter dedicated to
various manifestations of the comic strip in England and Scotland during
the second half of the nineteenth century, up to and including the comics
‘boom’ of the 1890s with which we are concerned here. Kunzle positions
the early comic strip within the evolving structures of modernity, empha-
sising how the fragmented, scattershot form of the comics page mirrored
the thrilling chaos of contemporary urban life.4 Although he does not
focus on the UK during the late nineteenth century, Thierry Smolderen’s
The Origins of Comics builds on Kunzle’s work, extending the focus to
include early American strips and concentrating on a number of key artists
associated with the large-circulation urban newspapers that provided a
platform for the evolving medium in the United States.5 He argues for
comics to be understood in terms of their medium-specific historical
development, but also in relation to other facets of late nineteenth-­century
visual culture. His elucidation of the evolving graphic vocabulary and its
historical basis in, to take one British example, William Hogarth’s inter-
weaving of high and low cultural registers, is useful for the consideration
of the narrative and stylistic options open to Yeats and other comics artists
of the later period, as well as allowing for an assessment of the relationship
of caricature, cartooning, and comic strips to art history more generally.
Earlier, in the first edited collection to comprehensively map out this
scholarly territory, Pascal Lefèvre and Charles Dierick drew together work
by various scholars, including Kunzle, focusing on European contexts, as
4 M. CONNERTY

well as the UK and US, in their Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip
in the Nineteenth Century, first published in 1998.6
Richard Scully has made substantial contributions to the scholarship on
nineteenth-century cartooning in the UK, particularly as detailed in his
Eminent Victorian Cartoonists,7 which argues for the importance of work
by a number of previously underexamined and, in some cases, disregarded
artists, many of whom would certainly have been familiar to the young
Yeats. Although the focus is primarily on single-panel cartoons, and par-
ticularly political and editorial cartoons, the volumes contain valuable
material dealing with social, cultural, and technological developments
during the period immediately before Yeats’ entry into the profession.
Punch was certainly the most successful and widely imitated of the
nineteenth-­century British periodicals, and it had a far-reaching impact on
comic art regionally within the UK, throughout the British Empire, and
in the United States. Historical and critical materials on humour periodi-
cals such as Punch are relevant to the present study for at least two reasons.
Firstly, Yeats contributed to Punch and similar titles both before and after
he began his work as a comic strip artist, and thus consideration of this
area is essential to a complete assessment of his career as a cartoonist.
Secondly, because the comics chiefly evolved out of the graphic humour
tradition in the UK, it is useful to have a sense of how those publications
differed from the comics, but also of what they shared with them, in terms
of style, content, and industrial context. Brian Maidment has also contrib-
uted valuable scholarship to the mapping out of nineteenth-century car-
tooning, and to the retrieval of work by hitherto overlooked artists.8
Patrick Leary’s The Punch Brotherhood outlines the social and cultural
structures that underpinned the production of Punch and provides a sense
of the social world of cartooning and illustration into which Yeats emerged
in the final decade of the century.9 Writing in the 1950s, R.G.G. Price
devotes a small amount of space to Yeats’ contributions, as well as provid-
ing a comprehensive overview of some of the technological developments
in printing and production that ushered in significant changes in graphic
style during the 1880s and 1890s.10 Scully characterises Punch as a kind of
‘informal empire’ that disseminated imperialist ideology throughout the
British dominions.11 Its influence was also felt in Ireland, where Punch was
widely read, and there are a small number of texts that deal with cartoon-
ing and the humour periodicals in that context, the most useful being
James Curry and Ciarán Wallace’s extensively illustrated volume on car-
toonist Thomas Fitzpatrick.12 It is important to note at this point that
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

there was no indigenous comics production in Ireland during these years,

though many of the titles to which Yeats contributed were widely distrib-
uted there.
One of the earliest chroniclers of the new British comics of the 1890s was
Denis Gifford. Gifford was a practioner rather than a scholar, and as a col-
lector, cataloguer, and populariser of early British comics, produced sev-
eral books, including Victorian Comics and The British Comic Catalogue,
that are, in the absence of more academic texts, essential sources for any
researcher.13 However, there are numerous gaps in both of these texts in
relation to Yeats, with various series not listed at all, and many of those that
do feature simply listed by title and year of first appearance, with no indica-
tion of precise publication dates or length of run. In general, not a great
deal of scholarly attention has been focused on the evolution of the British
comic strip in the 1890s, and the subsequent decades of its growing popu-
larity, and certainly there is no single source covering this period specifi-
cally, although valuable material is contained in texts with a wider focus, as
well as a number that examine particular artists or titles. Examples of the
former include a number of books by Roger Sabin, in which discussion of
wider international histories of comics includes useful material on the
development of British comics during this decade.14 As an example of the
latter, Sabin has written widely on the popular cartoon character Ally
Sloper, a forerunner, in the 1880s, of the strips discussed here, and, with
Simon Grennan and Julian Waite, has specifically revealed the contribution
to the evolution of the form made by Marie Duval (the pseudonym of
Isabella Tessier) during this period.15 Their co-authored monograph, Marie
Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist, demonstrates how an interdisciplin-
ary approach to comics history can open up the complex and intercon-
nected worlds of media, entertainment, and industrial practice within
which cartoonists were operating during the latter decades of the nine-
teenth century. As the first ‘star’ character in British comic art, Sloper
achieved a degree of recognition and celebrity that later artists, aiming to
build relationships between weekly publications and their readerships,
would seek to emulate. Sabin’s analysis of critical responses to the comics
in the late Victoria and Edwardian periods provides a useful overview of
contemporary reception, and the relationship of the comics to other areas
of popular publishing.16 Paul Gravett and Kevin Carpenter have also both
published research that covers the period under discussion.17 Carpenter was
responsible for building a very substantial collection of British comics at the
University of Oldenburg, and Wonderfully Vulgar, the online iteration of
6 M. CONNERTY

an exhibition based on this material, remains an important showcase of the

era’s comic strip artists, including Yeats.18 Texts dealing specifically with
individual comic strip artists working at the same time as Yeats are rare, and
one that does do this, John Harding’s biography of Ralph Hodgson,
focuses far more thoroughly on Hodgson’s subsequent career as a poet
than on his work as a cartoonist and art editor for the comics.19 Given the
importance of his role, as the media tycoon and visionary entrepreneur
behind the comics boom of the 1890s, and as publisher of many of the
titles to which Yeats contributed, studies dealing with Alfred Harmsworth,
such as Paul Ferris’ biography, provide important context for an analysis of
the industry and the commercial imperatives that necessarily shaped the
strips.20 The evolution of the comic strip in the US has been more exten-
sively covered by scholars, and some of the conceptual and historical frame-
works that underpin their writing can be usefully applied to the UK, as
with, for example, Ian Gordon’s book, Comic Strips and Consumer
Culture,21 in which he considers comics as part of a revolution in reader
demographics, advertising, leisure activity, mass entertainment, and con-
sumerism. Christina Meyer’s monograph, Producing Mass Entertainment:
The Serial Life of The Yellow Kid, offers useful ways to think about the roles
played by seriality and transmedia narrative in the functioning of comic
strips during this period.22
Though not explicitly focused on comics, authors such as Reed, Conboy,
and Kirkpatrick provide vital contextual information on the magazine and
periodical publishing industry in the UK, covering a number of related
genres such as the penny dreadful and the boys’ adventure magazine.23 It is
important to note that there were other types of publication which did not
specialise in the humorous graphic arts, but which were nonetheless impor-
tant in generating both a popular readership, and in pioneering specific
areas of form, layout, and content, that would later be adapted by the pub-
lishers of comic papers. In his overview of the popular magazine’s evolu-
tion in Britain, David Reed suggests that its nineteenth-­century history can
be divided into two periods, pre- and post-1880, and he regards the publi-
cation of George Newnes’ Tit-bits (1881–1989) in 1881 as pivotal.24 The
enormous success of this title inspired numerous imitations over the course
of the 1880s, two of which would contribute in various ways to the style
and content of the comics, James Henderson’s Scraps (1883–1910) and
Alfred Harmsworth’s Answers to Correspondents (1888–1889; 1889–1955
as ‘Answers’). As we will see, the first comics contained much material that
was not in cartoon or comic strip form, featuring the same kinds of literary
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

serials, feature articles, and general interest material as did many of the
other magazines and periodicals of the time. While all of these scholarly
perspectives contribute to the establishment of an industrial and cultural
context against which we can interrogate and position the work of Jack
B. Yeats in particular, it is also intended that this book should build on
previous research into British comics more generally, and function as a sub-
stantial contribution to that history. The comics capitalised on an audience
that already existed for various forms of popular spectacle and entertain-
ment and drew on these forms in their mode of address, their visual style,
and the thematic content of their strips. Thus authors of cultural histories,
such as Peter Bailey and Andrew Horrall, give us a sense of the audiences
for whom Yeats was catering, and the evolving world of mass entertainment
to which he was contributing.25 The growing literature on popular cultural
areas of specific interest to Yeats, music hall and the circus for example, has
informed more narrowly themed subsections.26
Although there has been little attention paid to his illustration work, and
almost none to his cartoons, it would not be true to say that there is a com-
plete absence of critical writing on these aspects of Yeats’ career. In the two
most important biographies of Jack Yeats by Pyle and Arnold, and particu-
larly in the case of the latter, quite a bit of space is given to discussion of the
cartoon and illustration work that Yeats produced during the late 1880s
and early 1890s for humour periodicals such as Ariel, Paddock Life and
Judy.27 Arnold devotes several paragraphs to analysis of these cartoons, as
does Pyle, although the comic strips don’t receive the same degree of atten-
tion as this material when their respective accounts reach that point in the
narrative of Yeats’ artistic development.28 Pyle, in an earlier text, sum-
marises Yeats’ comic strip output briefly, saying that at this time he “was
contributing to less elevated publications too, Chums (1892–1941), where
he appeared after 1892, Illustrated Chips (1890–1953), and Comic Cuts
(1890–1953) and other Harmsworth journals.”29 That critical and bio-
graphical accounts should have stopped short of the comics in this way is
partly explicable in terms of the lack of literature available at that time
detailing this early period in British comics history, much less Yeats’ role in
it. Moreover, the strips themselves were, for the most part, hidden away
within bound volumes in a small number of library archives, and had never
been reprinted, having long since disappeared from view in the time-­
honoured manner of popular ephemera. Hilary Pyle’s later publication, The
Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats, does devote a little more space to the
comics, although its chief value resides in its positioning of Yeats beyond
8 M. CONNERTY

the established boundaries of the fine art world, cataloguing and analysing
his extensive activities as a black and white artist, illustrator, and cartoon-
ist.30 It is hoped that the present volume might add in some small way to
the rigorous scholarship contained in that indispensable book. Throughout
her writing on Yeats, Pyle has been consistently alive to the various compet-
ing, and perhaps contradictory, elements in his life and career, noting that
the “practice of combining the serious with the frivolous became a pattern
of his creativity.”31 Writing more recently, art historians such as Róisín
Kennedy and Angela Griffith have built on this work in fresh and revealing
ways, revising and expanding our sense of Yeats’ relationship to popular
forms of art, media, and entertainment.32 Given that the discussion that
follows takes place at the intersection of two broad scholarly fields—Comics
Studies and Irish Studies—efforts will be made to clarify certain elements
for readers who are primarily familiar with one or other of these areas, or
indeed with neither.
Much of the relevant material is held in the British Library Newspaper
Collection and in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The condition of many
of the comics, the majority bound in volumes capturing a full year each, is
poor. Those published by Alfred Harmsworth in particular were printed
on the cheapest available paper, which is now so brittle as to make even
careful examination difficult. Indeed, several of the British Library’s vol-
umes are now marked ‘unfit for use.’ Long perusal of these volumes
involves extremely cautious turning of the delicate pages, and even with
the greatest of care it is difficult to avoid the crumbling of tiny shards of
browned paper onto the desktop. This physical deterioration prompts an
urgency with regard to the assessment of the material currently held in
libraries and archives. The collection purchased by Kevin Carpenter for the
library at Oldenburg University in Germany is less substantial, though is
in superior condition, the more compact bound volumes originally form-
ing part of Amalgamated Press’s own archive. In the Bodleian Library a
small part of the collection exists in the form of boxed individual comics,
affording the researcher the opportunity to access the material precisely as
would have been the case for contemporary readers.33
In the following chapter (Chap. 2) I will present a necessarily selective
overview of Yeats’ career and the evolution of his artistic reputation. Rather
than engaging with the painting work for which he is best known, the aim
here is to examine how a particular conception of Yeats has been built up
and structured around it, to the exclusion of the comic strips and other
related material. There are some parallels to be drawn between the
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

cartooning and the work in oils for which he is best known, for example in
the playful, and sometimes enigmatic, relation of text and image evident in
the titling of many of his paintings, and in recurring thematic and compo-
sitional elements. Over the course of his career, and particularly during the
decades that he was drawing the comic strips, Yeats produced work in a
number of areas that relate more directly to his cartooning, and there will
be an emphasis placed on these activities here. He wrote and produced
illustrations for miniature theatre plays, as well as illustrating stories for
children, written by himself and others. We can recognise continuities in
style and content between the comic strips and these publications, which
also evidence Yeats’ love of the print culture of the past, and a nostalgic
instinct that is key to an understanding of his popular art. Chapter 3 will
establish the context in which Yeats’ contribution can be better under-
stood—that of the early development of the comic strip in the United
Kingdom during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Yeats’ career
can be effectively mapped onto the broader narrative of this development,
given that he began by contributing illustrations and cartoons to various
humour publications before embracing the boom in mass-market comics,
exemplified by Alfred Harmsworth’s Comic Cuts. The conventions regard-
ing presentation, layout, humour, and graphic style were quickly estab-
lished and these impacted on the creative options available to Yeats over the
course of his career as a cartoonist. Chapter 4 will examine how Yeats met
the demands of the evolving medium. He appears to have instinctively
understood the need for the comic papers to draw on the surrounding
world of popular media and entertainment culture and condense the asso-
ciated thrills and spectacle into the vital, concise form of the comic strip.
Yeats developed an instantly recognisable and idiosyncratic approach to the
production of appealing material for his readers, while continuing to orient
his strips around some of his favourite themes: the outsider, street culture,
and performance. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the
commercial imperatives imposed by the context of the industrialised mass
media structures within which he operated.
Yeats was a very prolific artist who produced hundreds of strips and car-
toons over the course of his career. The majority of these strips feature
recurring characters, who appeared in series that ran for months, in some
cases years, at a time. In order to fully apprehend the variety of this mate-
rial, it will be helpful to examine it in a series of themed subsections over
the course of Chaps. 5 and 6. Although it is not possible to be exhaustive
in the current context, and many strips and characters cannot be included,
10 M. CONNERTY

the majority will be interrogated in relation to popular literature, specifi-

cally crime and adventure literature, and contemporary forms of spectacle
and entertainment, such as music hall and the circus. Many of Yeats’ strips
provide early examples of parody and intertextuality in the comics, and
cultural context is key to understanding their various effects. Two more
central themes in Yeats’ work will be given special attention in these chap-
ters. Firstly, the representation of animal characters, and his particular take
on anthropomorphism. Secondly, and perhaps most surprisingly to anyone
familiar with his work, his engagement with modernity and technology,
often through the employment of tropes associated with the nascent sci-
ence fiction genre. The work was once well known, and several of Yeats’
characters proved popular with the public. A key issue which the final chap-
ter (Chap. 7) will address is the absence of this substantial body of work
from biographical or art-historical accounts of Yeats’ career. One factor is
certainly the condescension with which comics have traditionally been
regarded by the art-world establishment, and this, arguably, impacted
Yeats’ own sense of himself as a strip artist as much as it has subsequently
coloured the wider critical neglect of this aspect of his career. Socio-political
factors, such as the Irish nationalist ambivalence (before and after indepen-
dence) towards British popular culture, and the identification of Yeats with
an insular construction of national identity, left little space for the comic
strip work in the narrative of his development as an artist.
Jack Yeats was one of a small group who helped shape the form of
popular comics in Britain, in a manner that would remain constant through
much of the twentieth century. There was a vast audience for this work,
which would have included large numbers of children, as well as many,
many others who would not have been exposed to his work as a painter,
but who, rather, encountered Yeats as a popular entertainer, a graphic
purveyor of accessible gags and slapstick comedy. In the past, there have
been issues in dealing with Yeats concerning the privileging of certain
sources, and I hope that the identification and assessment of this wealth of
material will open up fresh perspectives on Jack Yeats the artist and offer
profitable avenues of research for scholars of cultural history, British com-
ics, and Irish art. Additional strips and cartoons continue to pop up, and
I’ve no doubt that this will continue to be the case into the future. It is
further hoped that something of the humour and vitality of these strips
and the characters therein can be not only acknowledged but enjoyed and
celebrated, and that we can tip our collective hat in recognition of Yeats’
great achievement.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Notes
1. Sarah Slater, “Jack Butler Yeats painting makes €1.7m in ‘white glove
sale’” Irish Independent, 28 November 2019.
2. Throughout the book I will be referring to ‘British’ comics (as opposed to,
say, ‘English’ comics). One reason for this is to indicate the geographical
boundaries within which the publications were distributed and consumed.
Another is to present the earlier comics as belonging to the graphic tradi-
tion that would later include examples such as The Beano and The Dandy
(both published in Scotland). It should be noted that prior to the forma-
tion of the Irish Free State in 1922, ‘British’ could be understood to mean
‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.’
3. David Kunzle, The History of the Comic Strip Vol. 1: Picture Stories and
Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet, ca. 1450–1826 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973); and The History of the Comic Strip
Vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990).
4. At the time of writing, a new work by Kunzle has been announced (David
Kunzle, Rebirth of the English Comic Strip, A Kaleidoscope 1847–70,
Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2021). I regret that the present
work will therefore not be informed by what will be, one suspects, an
insightful and thorough rethinking of that period.
5. Thierry Smolderen, The Origin of the Comics: From William Hogarth to
Winsor McCay, translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson:
University of Mississippi, 2014).
6. Charles Dierick and Pascal Lefèvre eds. Forging a New Medium: The Comic
Strip in the Nineteenth Century (Brussels: VUB University Press, 1998).
7. Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists Vols 1–3, (London: The
Political Cartoon Society, 2018).
8. Brian Maidment, Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
9. Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in
Mid-­Victorian London, London: British Library, 2010.
10. R.G.G. Price, A History of Punch. London: Collins, 1957.
11. Richard Scully, “A Comic Empire: The Global Expansion of Punch as a
Model Publication, 1841–1936”, International Journal of Comic Art 15
No. 2 (2013):8; see also Brian Maidment, “The Presence of Punch in the
Nineteenth Century,” in Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler eds. Asian
Punches: A Transcultural Affair (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013).
12. James Curry and Ciarán Wallace, Thomas Fitzpatrick and the Leprechaun
Cartoon Monthly (Dublin: Dublin City Council, 2015).
12 M. CONNERTY

13. Denis Gifford, Victorian Comics (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1976); Denis Gifford, The British Comic Catalogue (Westport Connecticut:
Greenwood Press, 1975).
14. Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (London: Phaidon.
1996); and Adult Comics: an Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993).
15. Roger Sabin, “Ally Sloper: the First Comics Superstar?” in A Comics
Studies Reader, ed. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester (Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press), 177–189; Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian
Waite, Marie Duval, Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2020); and Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin,
and Julian Waite, Marie Duval (Oxford: Myriad Editions, 2018).
16. Roger Sabin, “Comics versus books: the new criticism at the ‘fin de siè-
cle’.” In Transforming Anthony Trollope: Dispossession, Victorianism and
Nineteenth Century Word and Image edited by Simon Grennan and
Lawrence Grove, 107–129. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015.
17. Paul Gravett, “The Cartoonist’s Progress: The Inventors of Comics in
Great Britain.” In Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip in the
Nineteenth Century, edited by Charles Dierick and Pascal Lefèvre,
(Brussels: VUB University Press, 1998) 79–103; and Kevin Carpenter,
Penny Dreadfuls and Comics: English Periodicals for Children from Victorian
Times to the Present Day (London: V&A Publishing, 1983). See also: James
Chapman, British Comics: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion, 2011;
and Michael Demson and Heather Brown, “Ain’t I de Maine Guy in Dis
Parade?”: towards a radical history of comic strips and their audience since
Peterloo” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 2 No. 2 (2011): 151–167.
18. “Wonderfully Vulgar: British Comics 1873–1939” accessed at wonderful-
lyvulgar.de on 23 July 2020.
19. John Harding, Dreaming of Babylon: The Life and Times of Ralph Hodgson
(London: Greenwich Exchange, 2008).
20. Paul Ferris, The House of Northcliffe: The Harmsworths of Fleet Street
(London: Garden City Press, 1971). See also: Howard Cox and Simon
Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in
Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
21. Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture (Washington DC:
Smithsonian Institute, 1998).
22. Christina Meyer, Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the
Yellow Kid (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019).
23. David Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States
1880–1960 (London: The British Library, 1997); Martin Conboy, The
Press and Popular Culture (London: SAGE Publications, 2001); and
Robert J. Kirkpatrick, From the Penny Dreadful to the Ha’penny Dreadfuller:
A Bibliographic History of the Boys’ periodical in Britain 1762–1930
(London: The British Library, 2013).
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

24. David Reed, op. cit. 99.

25. Bailey, Peter, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Andrew Horrall, Popular
Culture in London c. 1890–1918: The Transformation of Entertainment.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.
26. For example, on the circus: Gillian Arrighi, The circus and modernity: a
commitment to the ‘newer’ and the ‘newest’ Early Popular Visual Culture
10 no. 2 (2012): 169–185; Peta Tait, Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in
Aerial Performance (London: Routledge, 2005); on music hall: Dagmar
Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict. Translated by
Roy Kift (Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Barry J. Faulk, Music
hall and modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004).
27. Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Biography (London: Routledge, 1970); Bruce
Arnold, Jack Yeats (New haven, CT: Yale University Press: 1998).
28. For example, see Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 58–59; Pyle, 1970, op. cit. 36–37.
29. Pyle, 1970, op. cit. 40.
30. Hilary Pyle, The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats (Dublin: Irish Academic
Press, 1994).
31. Pyle, 1993, op. cit. 94.
32. Róisín Kennedy, “Divorcing Jack … from Irish Politics”; Angela Griffith,
“Impressions: Jack Yeats’ Approach to Fine Art Publishing,” both in
Yvonne Scott ed. Jack B. Yeats: Old and New Departures (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 2008).
33. I am also grateful to Dr Marcus Free for sharing with me his collection of
comics from this period, many of which are, again, in their original form as
individual issues.
 CHAPTER 2

A Life of Jack B. Yeats: His Painting,

Drawing, and Illustration Work

Jack Butler Yeats was born on 29 August 1871 at 23 Fitzroy Road in

London, the city of his birth a not insignificant detail in the light of his
later canonisation as a national icon in Ireland. He is among the most
important Irish visual artists of the twentieth century—many would say
the most important—and has long been celebrated as such within Ireland
itself where he remains a very well-known figure. His fame internationally
has always been less substantial, particularly relative to that of his older
brother, William B. Yeats, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright.
His two sisters, Lily and Elizabeth, were co-founders of the Dun Emer
Guild, which helped establish the Irish Arts and Crafts movement in the
early 1900s. His father, John Butler Yeats, was a painter of limited success,
who is recorded in most of the biographical accounts as having misman-
aged his career as an artist and lawyer, and jeopardised the family’s finan-
cial stability through an impractical approach to his business affairs.1 The
family, of Anglo-Irish Protestant stock, were “‘respectable’ gentlefolk who
had come down in the world.”2 Jack’s mother, Susan Pollexfen, was reput-
edly uncomfortable around her husband’s artistic friends, and was very
attached to the Sligo of her childhood, to which she would frequently
travel, often for long spells, with the children.3 Jack himself was to spend
a good deal of his childhood in Sligo living with his maternal grandpar-
ents, a period and a location that would resurface frequently in his art and
writing throughout the rest of his life. His grandfather, William Pollexfen,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_2
16 M. CONNERTY

had apparently experienced a life of high adventure prior to settling into a

career as a successful merchant, having run away to sea at the age of
twelve.4 Jack enjoyed the comic papers as a child,5 and there is substantial
evidence that he was a keen draughtsman and sketcher from an early age.6
Much of the juvenilia that survives is in the form of cartoons and comic
strips, indicating that it was specifically this area of graphic endeavour that
preoccupied him at this time in his life.
He returned to London in 1887, having received all his schooling dur-
ing the intervening years in Sligo, and attended the South Kensington Art
School, later taking classes at the Chiswick School of Art.7 T.G. Rosenthal
suggests that in many respects a more significant event of this period was
his acquiring a season ticket for the American exhibition at Earls Court,
where the main attraction was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.8 This was
certainly a time during which Yeats immersed himself in the sporting and
entertainment world of the city, something that would have a profound
influence on the character of his later cartooning and comic strip work. He
received sporadic training as a painter in London, between 1887 and
1889, but never completed his artistic education. Bruce Arnold suggests
that there were a number of disadvantages to his being largely self-taught.
He did not learn his craft from a more experienced painter, nor did he
move in the artistic circles that might have given him access to current
ideas about art and artistic practice.9 He would suffer later from various
technical shortcomings, for example in the preparation of paint and can-
vas, and this has had an impact on the condition of his work in oil over
time. It is possible that this lack of formal training as a painter, which
delayed his entry into that area by some years, was instrumental in his
development as a black and white graphic artist, and ultimately as a car-
toonist and illustrator. The skills of draughtsmanship which he undoubt-
edly possessed had themselves been honed, without tuition, during the
hours of obsessive sketching and doodling with which he had occupied
himself from an early age. Arnold draws attention to the fact that Jack’s
father’s inability to generate a regular income for himself and his family
was partly due to “an unrealistic fastidiousness about taking work as an
illustrator,”10 and it is tempting to interpret this as fuelling the work ethic
and dogged pursuit of precisely that kind of opportunity which character-
ised Jack’s early professional activities. It may have given the young Yeats
a very pragmatic motivation for ignoring the perceived cultural hierarchies
that existed around the various forms of artistic practice.
 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 17

In any event, having received an introduction to the editor through a

friend, Roland Hall, while still a student at the Chiswick School of Art,11
Jack Yeats began his career as an illustrator contributing drawings to a
periodical titled The Vegetarian (1888–1920), in 1888, maintaining the
relationship up to 1894. Over subsequent years he would have his work
published in a number of other publications that dealt more specifically in
humorous content. These titles were broadly in the mould of the humour
periodicals that had thrived during the second half of the century, and
included Paddock Life (1888–1900), Chums, and Judy (1867–1910).
Most of the material produced by Yeats during this early period came in
the form of single-panel cartoons, which generally appeared with a line of
text below the image that clarified the thrust of the joke, as was the norm.
He continued to produce this kind of material for some years following his
shift to the strip format preferred by the new comic papers. A crucial ele-
ment of many of the essentialist definitions of comics is the requirement
that they consist of a sequence of images, hence ‘sequential graphic narra-
tive’ has become a widely accepted phrase within Comics Studies, and
editorial newspaper cartoons and single-panel gags, for example, have
tended to fall outside the purview of the field. It is unlikely that Yeats
himself, or his contemporaries, would have differentiated in the same way
between these different modes, and while our main focus here is on the
sequential strips, it is important to also consider correspondences between
these and other examples of his cartooning and illustration work. It will be
particularly instructive to consider such examples where these appear in
the publications that also featured his strips. His first contribution to the
comics came in December of 1892 with the two-panel strip titled “All
Gone to Pot,” published in Comic Cuts, the historically important title
first published by Alfred Harmsworth two years earlier.12 It’s not clear by
what means he initiated what would become a lengthy relationship with
Comic Cuts, whether through a social or professional contact, or simply by
answering one of the advertisements seeking graphic work that regularly
appeared in its pages. “Clever artists should submit work to the editor of
‘Comic Cuts’ enclosing large stamped directed envelope for return, in case
of rejection,” was an almost weekly call, accompanied by a pledge that
payment would be “immediate.”13 He was to continue providing strips for
Comic Cuts and for various other titles published by Alfred Harmsworth—
as well as for comics published by others—over the quarter century that
followed, and while he also produced work in other areas, including
18 M. CONNERTY

illustration and fine art, this was to be his principal professional activity
throughout that period.
In 1894, at which point he had been contributing for two years to the
comics, in addition to the sporting magazines and humour periodicals
with which he was already associated, Yeats married fellow artist Mary
Cottenham White (‘Cottie’) and began to live a settled life in a cottage in
Strete, Devon. During this time, he was also pushing to bring his drawing
and watercolour work to public attention. In 1897 he held an exhibition
of watercolours at the Clifford Gallery in London, almost all of which
were executed in Devon. Pyle notes in this work “the same angularity, the
emphasis on graphic treatment” that was evident in his black and white
work of the period.14 Yeats kept sketchbooks throughout his life, many of
which are now held in the National Gallery of Ireland’s Jack Yeats Archive,
and these provide a vivid visual diary that offers fascinating insight into his
daily life, his travels, and his artistic preoccupations. These are mainly
pocket-sized books, manufactured by Daler, which in total comprise in the
region of nine thousand pages of sketches and notes.15 There were regular
trips back to Ireland, and in numerous sketchbooks he documents land-
scapes and small-town life, including local characters and incidents. We
can also get a sense of his life in Devon, and his trips to London and
beyond. There are numerous drawings of stage shows and sporting events,
particularly boxing and horse racing. There are many, many drawings of
people: friends and acquaintances; strangers observed in public places,
often engaged in specific professional activities; performers, including
singers, stage actors, and comedians; all kinds of characters captured in
speedily executed ink and pencil sketches. The books are also filled with
small details, including shop signs, advertising hoardings, whiskey bottle
labels, and the covers of cheap paperbacks in window displays, evidencing
the wandering eye of a flaneur in his enthusiastic absorption in contempo-
rary urban life. Much of this spirit is also evident in his strips, and the
sketchbooks constitute a common pool of source material for Yeats, a link
between the comics work, the illustration, and the paintings.
In 1899 Yeats held another exhibition of his work, titled “Sketches of
Life in the West of Ireland,” at the Walker Art Gallery in London, repeated
later in the year at Leinster Hall in Dublin. Throughout the period that he
worked as a comic strip artist, Yeats alternated between galleries in these
two cities with reasonable regularity, averaging one solo show annually up
to 1914. At this point, there were various important figures in Yeats’ life
who played roles in his burgeoning fine art career, such as the New York
 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 19

lawyer John Quinn, who bought many of his paintings, and was instru-
mental in getting him into the Armory Show, the celebrated event in the
early evolution of American modernism, also referred to as the International
Exhibition of Modern Art, in 1913. It’s unlikely that Yeats would have
known that several of the other exhibited painters at this pivotal event,
including Rudolph Dirks and Gus Mager, were also active comic strip art-
ists, contributing to some of the most popular American newspapers of the
time.16 Yeats didn’t attend himself, and travelled to New York only once,
in 1904, to attend a large exhibition of his work, organised by Quinn, at
Clausen’s Gallery, on Fifth Avenue.17 Another impactful figure for Yeats
was Lady Gregory, a patron of the arts and one of the key drivers of the
Cultural Revival that invigorated the literary and dramatic—and to a lesser
extent the visual—arts in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth and into the
early twentieth century.18 Following a visit to her home in May 1899, dur-
ing which she may well have encouraged Yeats’ fine art ambitions, his
father wrote to her that “I think you have done a great deal with Jack […]
he has ideas, ambitions, hopes that he never had before.”19 In any event,
she was very public in her admiration for him, promoting him as an impor-
tant national artist, and became a regular attendee at his Irish exhibitions.20
He returned to Ireland to settle permanently in 1910, and while he would
maintain his ties to the London-based comics industry, and continue to be
a very active comic strip artist for some years to come, this was nonetheless
a decade of transition for him, and by the end of it the painting had
become dominant, and would remain so for the rest of his career.
Yeats did not come to oil painting until later in his life—he was thirty-­
one at the time that his earliest known painting in oil was produced in
1902—and the majority of the work for which he is best known was exe-
cuted after he had ceased to work as a comic strip artist (although he
continued to produce single-panel cartoons for Punch until well into his
sixties). In 1920 he was involved in the establishment, with Paul Henry,
Mary Swanzy, and others, of the Irish Painters Society, an organisation of
young artists eager to absorb the currents of contemporary European
modernism and open up new possibilities for support and exhibition.
Other important figures, central to the development of the visual arts in
Ireland in the twentieth century, such as Manie Jellett and Harry Clarke,
would join this group over the next few years.21 The work executed during
this earlier phase of his career as a painter was largely illustrative in style,
and in that sense can be readily linked to his black and white work, and
indeed to his comic strips. He often focuses on characters, representative
20 M. CONNERTY

of broad ‘types,’ and using a visual shorthand familiar from popular car-
tooning, as in The Bruiser (1900) and The Lesser Official (1913). The
bustling interiors in paintings like A Full Tram (1923) and Jazz Babies
(1929) suggest a preoccupation with urban modernity that would be less
evident in the work of his later years, but which echoes that milieu as it
appeared in many of his series for the comics. Drawing on the illustrative
and cartoon material he contributed to periodicals in the late 1880s and
1890s, there are numerous images depicting the predominantly masculine
world of sports, including depictions of pugilistic encounters, such as The
Small Ring (1930), which also pays close attention to the surrounding
crowd. This focus on audience is a notable feature of a number of his
paintings depicting scenes of performance and spectacle, for example in
theatrical scenes like National Airs: Patriotic Airs (1923) and Willy Reilly
at the Old Mechanics Theatre (c. 1899–1909), the latter foreshadowing, in
composition as well as theme, his stage-bound comic strip from 1907 to
1908, ‘The Jester Theatre Royal.’
Perhaps more conventionally associated with Yeats in the public mind
are his representations of the west of Ireland, for example in a work like
Island Men Returning (1919), which vividly renders the nobility of hard-
ened fishermen pitting their strength against the dramatic swell of the
Atlantic. There are several well-known paintings that do perhaps suggest a
straightforwardly Republican agenda, such as Singing ‘The Dark Rosaleen’:
Croke Park (1923), which commemorates the events of ‘Bloody Sunday,’
when British forces opened fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match in
Dublin in 1920. If many of the accounts of Yeats have dwelt on the per-
ceived nationalism of his art, and rooted it firmly in an Irish sensibility, it
is also true that others have recognised influences from outside Ireland,
including the impact of specific painters such as London-based Walter
Sickert, and representatives of contemporary movements in European art,
including Edvard Munch, Edward Degas, and Yeats’ friend, Oskar
Kokoschka.22 Having produced many important paintings during the
1920s, there was a period during the middle of the 1930s when Yeats was
not especially productive. Arnold notes that he had a solo exhibition in
Dublin in 1931 but did not exhibit on his own again until 1939.23 An
important retrospective exhibition of his work was held in the National
College of Art in Dublin, opening in June 1945.
This event represented the most significant consolidation of his work
up to that point and was the occasion of his “being honoured by his coun-
try, as its greatest living painter.”24 Brian P. Kennedy’s remarks on the
 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 21

development of his technique in the later years suggest the degree to

which Yeats had shifted artistically since his time as a cartoonist. He tended
not to use underdrawing in the execution of his late work, seeming to
ultimately lose interest in line, which he abandoned in favour of “a form
of free oil painting.”25 Many of these images include dramatically rendered
horses, sometimes pictured alone, sometimes in relation to human figures,
who, though far removed stylistically, nonetheless recall the equine car-
toon characters of his youth. There is still plenty of evidence of his earlier
interests—for example, the circus and fairground remained an abidingly
rich source of material, as evidenced by later paintings like The Water
Chute (1944) and They Love Me (1950). The love of disguise and dressing
up is still a feature of paintings like The Bang the Door Boys (1944) and The
Fool Chase (1944), both of which echo similarly uncanny subjects in the
paintings of James Ensor, whose rough incorporation of cartooning and
caricatural tradition into his work of the 1880s also bears comparison with
Yeats. One can recognise the kind of elements that attracted the admira-
tion of Samuel Beckett: the often-solitary figures, ghostly rather than cor-
poreal, inhabiting desolate, non-specific landscapes, their purpose or
intentions less than clear.26 These later works, with their loose and exuber-
ant approach to figure and colour, do indeed seem unrelated in most
respects to the illustration and cartoon work, and are certainly less so than
were the paintings of the 1920s. One element identified by Hilary Pyle
which does suggest some continuity is the playful relationship between
text and image evident in the titling of many of his late painting, echoing
one of the key features of comics art, and of the captioning of single-panel
cartoons. His titles could be enigmatic or open to multiple interpreta-
tions, as in the case of There Is No Night (1949), the words revealing hid-
den potentials in the image. In other instances he borrowed lines from
pre-existing sources, setting up evocative intertextual links to, for exam-
ple, traditional balladry, as in the case of Rise Up Willy Reilly (1945).27 He
was creatively active until late in life and produced a substantial number of
important paintings in his seventies.
Jack B. Yeats died in Dublin on 28 March 1957, at the age of eighty-­
five, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Harold’s Cross. At
that point it had been about two decades since he had been regularly con-
tributing to Punch, and two more decades prior to that when he had
contributed his last strip to the comic papers. While avoiding, I hope, the
attraction of an excessively neat and reductive view of his career, it is pos-
sible, broadly speaking, to divide Yeats’ artistic life into two reasonably
22 M. CONNERTY

distinct halves. During the first of these he was primarily engaged in black
and white work that appeared in popular media, in the form of illustration,
cartoons, and comic strips, and in the second half he became preoccupied
with oil painting and operated primarily within the quite different context
of the art world. There is of course plenty of slippage and overlap between
these two periods, as well as a significant thread of artistic independence
and idiosyncrasy common to both.
Following his death (and to a certain degree before it), Jack Yeats
increasingly came to be identified with the Irish nation in a way that
defined the reception of his art. For Róisín Kennedy, “his reputation is,
and has always been, inextricably bound up with Irish nationalism,” and
debates around this have informed much of the critical interrogation of his
work.28 While a certain amount of criticism has taken his nationalist status
for granted, much recent writing has tended to problematise this notion
with regards to Yeats,29 partly following a reassessment of nationalism in
twentieth-century Irish art more generally. Art historian S.B. Kennedy
asserts that Yeats, “who is often cast as the painter of revolutionary Ireland,
was really an observer, there was nothing prescriptive in his work.”30
Indeed Yeats himself was publicly reticent about his politics, and held
strong views around the separation of art from the artist’s biography.31
Cyril Barrett suggests that there was an absence of political nationalism in
Irish art generally, certainly prior to the Easter Rising and the War of
Independence.32 He considers that Yeats produced a nationalistic art to
the extent that he focused on and celebrated the lives of ordinary Irish
people, and points, as have other commentators, to a number of paintings
that, albeit tangentially, deal with political events in Ireland during the
years of revolutionary turmoil and civil war. Yeats was one of a relatively
small number of artists who satisfied the desire on the part of Irish art crit-
ics and cultural commentators to establish the grounds for a definitively
Irish art, just as a sense of nationalist self-determination was sought in
other areas of contemporary cultural and social life during the decades fol-
lowing independence. This critical emphasis on the issue of Yeats’ nation-
alism and his relationship to Ireland has tended to obscure his substantial
contribution to British popular culture during the early decades of
his career.
 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 23

An early example of this approach to the construction of Yeats as a

painter of and for Ireland was Thomas McGreevy’s 1945 essay, Jack
B. Yeats, an Appreciation and an Interpretation, in which he describes him
as a “painter who in his work was the consummate expression of the spirit
of his own nation at one of the supreme points in its evolution.”33
McGreevy glosses over the cartooning and comic strip work with a brief
line indicating that “[h]e had done some work of an illustrative character
in England but it was only when he returned home that he truly found
himself.”34 This erasure of the role played by his work in England, includ-
ing his comic strip work, and a ‘Year Zero’ conception of his return to
Ireland in 1910, is typical of much Yeats criticism and became the conven-
tional view of his progress as an artist. The centenary of his birth in 1971
was marked by a large exhibition in the National Gallery in Dublin, which
subsequently travelled to Belfast and New York. An early indication of the
elevation of Yeats to the status of national icon is evident in the speech
given at the opening in Dublin by the then Taoiseach,35 Jack Lynch, in
which he called Yeats “an ideal Irishman,” further proclaiming that he
“regarded Irish nationhood, the Irish language and every element of
native Irish culture as taking precedence over all other considerations.”36
A piece produced by the national broadcaster, RTE, during the same year,
features the Director of the National Gallery, James White, singling out
three paintings as representative. His choices are significant in that of the
three, two, Bachelor’s Walk: In Memory (1915) and Communicating with
Prisoners (1924), deal with republican subjects.37 In 1987, White appeared
in another RTE production, Eye of the Artist, again emphasising Yeats’
nationalist sympathies with regard to a sketch of the funeral of Fenian
leader Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, which Yeats had attended in 1915.38
At the same time as this narrative was developing, as Hilary Pyle notes,
“[p]art of the mystery of the magnificent Yeats that caused so much uncer-
tainty was—what had he been doing until nearly the age of forty without
a respectable oil painting to his name?”39 Following Yeats’ death, over the
course of the 1960s, gallery owners Victor Waddington and Leo Smith
made available a large collection of watercolours and ink drawings which
were seen by the public for the first time in half a century. Black and white
work, including his illustrations for J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands,40 which
remains in print, and reproductions of his early illustrations, particularly
those with rural and equestrian elements, have for some time formed a
familiar and widely admired part of the iconography of early twentieth-­
century Ireland. However, while there certainly is a broad awareness of the
24 M. CONNERTY

earlier work, it is as a painter that Yeats is primarily celebrated, and, if the

illustration work is less prominently acknowledged, the comic strip work
has vaporised from view almost entirely. The final chapter will address
questions related to the neglect of his cartooning and comic strip work,
but here, in terms of establishing the reputation of Yeats as it currently
stands, it will suffice to state that a confluence of factors, including Yeats’
own professional motivations, resulted in that work being swept under the
art-historical carpet for many decades, with the result that it is the second
half of his working life that is most commonly called to mind whenever his
name is mentioned.
An article which appeared in The Irish Times on 21 September 1953 is
almost unique, in terms of Irish newspaper or periodical press, in contain-
ing a direct reference to Yeats’ work as a comic strip artist.41 The anony-
mously written London Letter includes an account of an article written by
Alfred Byrne, which had appeared in The Manchester Guardian two days
earlier.42 Byrne’s article was written to mark the occasion of the final pub-
lications, after more than sixty years, of both Comic Cuts and Illustrated
Chips, and provides a reasonably comprehensive overview of both, includ-
ing reference to comic strip artists such as Tom Browne. Interestingly,
both articles employ the same conceit: the withholding of Yeats’ name,
while describing his work on the strip, only to reveal it with a flourish at
the end. The implication is that the name was a well-known one in 1953,
but not in connection with his earlier fame as a cartoonist, and that the
revelation that he had produced this kind of work in the past should come
as a surprise to readers of both The Manchester Guardian and The Irish
Times. It is difficult to gauge the reliability of the following quotation
from the Guardian article, apparently based on remarks made by an edi-
tor, then still employed by Amalgamated Press: “[h]e contributed thou-
sands of pictures at modest fees, and it was only […] when he began
demanding 10s a picture that the directors felt he was getting too big for
his boots,” but it is also paraphrased in the Irish Times piece. Equally, one
cannot be sure as to the reliability of the assertion in Byrne’s article that
Yeats supplied “drawings, ideas, and captions himself,” and the question
of the authorship of the captioned text in his comic strips, to which we will
return, remains a difficult one to answer definitively. The appearance of
the Irish Times article, four years before Yeats’ death, appears not to have
provoked any interest in his comic strip work, and stands as a lone indica-
tion of that activity in Irish commentary, up until the time, in 1970, of the
brief allusion in Pyle’s biography mentioned earlier. What appears to have
been the first appearance of one of his strips in an Irish publication was an
 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 25

example from the series “Ephriam Broadbeamer, Smuggler, Pirate and

Other Things,” originally published in The Funny Wonder on 7 July 1898,
and reprinted in Gifford’s Victorian Comics in 1976.43 The strip was used
to accompany a brief review of the latter publication, in The Irish Times of
3 June 1976.44 It is certainly odd that Eugene McEldowney’s review,
which presents an overview of the Gifford book rather than a critique of
it, fails to comment on or to otherwise note the prominent position of
Yeats within its pages. The strip itself is also presented without comment,
which, given the fact that it must have been surprising to readers at that
time to discover that Yeats had produced comic strips at all, is a curious
omission. It remains the only such reprinting in an Irish newspaper or
magazine.
There are a number of areas in which Yeats was productive, outside the
fine art realm with which he is generally associated, which are useful to
focus on here as demonstrations of the links between his varied artistic
activity and his comic strip work. While these areas of practice were in
many respects discrete, much of the work during this period, springing
from the same hand, the same artistic sensibility, and evidencing many
similar preoccupations, can be viewed in terms of relations and correspon-
dences as much as differences. It was not necessarily unusual for artists to
move between different spheres of activity, and Robert Kirkpatrick has
highlighted the work of a number of illustrators and cartoonists of this era
who also operated successfully as fine artists. One such example is Frederick
Barnard who, as well as contributing cartoons to the periodicals Fun,
Harper’s Weekly (1850–), and, like Yeats, Judy and Lika Joko (1894–1895),
exhibited his paintings at the Royal Academy from 1866 to 1887.45 The
focus in what follows will be principally on Yeats’ illustration work, and
specifically on areas that closely relate, either thematically or stylistically, to
the strips. Relative to his paintings in oil, this illustration work has not
been subject to the same degree of scholarly attention, though it has been
acknowledged in the literature.46 However, what critical material does
exist has not taken into account the relationship to his comic strip output
or sought to establish areas of commonality between the two activities.
Thus, in a chapter that aims to establish the salient aspects of Jack B. Yeats’
artistic reputation as it currently stands, it will be of value to examine some
recognised examples of his work that in some sense ‘prepare the ground’
for a focus on the strips.
Among the specifically Irish projects Yeats worked on while producing
comic strips for British publications, the most important are arguably the
26 M. CONNERTY

Fig. 2.1 A Broad Sheet No. 4 April 1902

 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 27

series A Broad Sheet (Fig. 2.1), published by Elkin Mathews in London

from 1902 to 1903, and A Broadside, published by Dun Emer and Cuala
Press in Dublin from 1908 to 1914. Both series of publications featured
drawings and verse printed on a single page (in the case of the Broadside
series, this was folded to make three surfaces), and, while very different in
style and tone, there are nonetheless similarities to the comics in terms of
layout and the interplay of word and image. The verses came from a com-
bination of contemporary contributors (including Yeats himself) and his-
torical sources—the illustrations were generally his (again there is some
difference between the two series, with Yeats’ graphic work dominating in
the second series). A contemporary reviewer writing of the Broadsides in
1912 emphasised their national character and the work of cultural archiving
at the centre of them, rejoicing that in Yeats’ publications, “many of the
ballads that are disappearing with the broadsheets are gathered up.”47
With both series, Yeats was adapting an earlier popular medium, the
broadside, or catchpenny print, in circulation since the sixteenth century,
but particularly prevalent in the late eighteenth and first half of the nine-
teenth century. Many of the original broad sheets centred on religious
material, but as often contained dramatic news items, especially pertaining
to disasters, crimes, and executions.48 Many featured the lyrics of popular
songs sold by travelling ballad singers—and it is this latter tradition that
Yeats emulates.49 It was also a medium that, in its original form, would
have been comparable to the comics of Yeats’ time, insofar as they were
relatively cheap and were widely consumed by the lower social classes.
However, crucially, Yeats’ two series were not published for a mass reader-
ship and were produced to a higher degree of quality than would have
been the case with traditional ballad sheets. Yeats was involved with the
Arts and Crafts Society in Dublin, exhibiting some bookplates at their
second exhibition in 1899 and continuing his association with them until
at least 1917.50 That movement’s emphasis on older printing techniques
was surely an influence on Yeats here. The effects achieved through the
imitation of the older woodcut style had much in common with the com-
ics, in its emphasis on simplicity of character design and its use of bold
outlines and heavy black frames. The Dun Emer Press, later evolving into
the Cuala Press, was operated by Yeats’ sisters, Elizabeth and Lily, both
central figures in the visual arts side of the Celtic Revival, and published
poetry, literature, and drama, much of it illustrated, by leading figures
such as W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge. His co-editor for the
first year of A Broad Sheet was Pamela Colman Smith (or ‘Pixie’), artist,
28 M. CONNERTY

writer, and illustrator of, among other things, the long-enduring Rider-­
Waite Tarot Deck.51 His wife Cottie also contributed, and indeed the num-
ber of women collaborating with Yeats on this material must have seemed
very much at odds with the almost entirely male-dominated world of
Comic Cuts and The Big Budget (1897–1909).
Yeats may have had commercial ambitions for A Broad Sheet initially,
since his publisher—and family friend—Elkin Mathews was printing it in
limited runs of about 300 per monthly issue. A Broadside, which was pub-
lished not by Mathews, but in collaboration with his sister Elizabeth at the
Dun Emer Press in Dublin, was conceived as an ‘art’ publication, and its
consumption was limited to that milieu.52 Attempts were made to exploit
its commercial potential by producing hand-coloured prints of individual
images. The emphasis on broadly defined characters is something that
relates, albeit distantly, to his comic strip work. The figures that populate
the pages of the Broadsides are often named as specific character types
(another legacy of cartooning?) and are in some cases given proper names.
There is even a hint of the kind of repetition of recurring elements which
was such a key feature of the comics, for example in the appearance in
more than one issue of the Italian Marionettes.53 Another recurring figure
with strong ties to Yeats’ comic strip work was Theodore the Pirate, a
character Yeats had invented with his friend, the poet John Masefield, and
about whom they regularly corresponded, sharing stories and drawings.54
There are numerous generic continuities too, with many images of pirates,
the Wild West, and particularly the circus. The individual images (usually
though not always) appear in a larger format than the average comic strip
panel, allowing for a greater degree of complexity in the rendering of loca-
tion and space. Though both are examples of Yeats’ work with print media,
and while A Broad Sheet and A Broadside were initially published in small
runs, they are now far better-known examples of his artistic output than
are the widely read comic strips he created during the same period. They
correspond more readily with established conceptions of Yeats, and are,
justly, celebrated as relatively rare graphic expressions of the Cultural
Revival. As such they have enjoyed a lengthy afterlife, with many of the
images continuing in circulation as individual prints, produced by the
Cuala Press up to the 1940s.55
Yeats maintained a productive working relationship with Elkin Mathews
during the first decade of the 1900s, which, as well as the first series of A
Broad Sheet, resulted in the publication of several small chapbooks, written
 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 29

and illustrated by Yeats, and oriented towards a juvenile reader. The two
had formed a close friendship that dated back at least to the early 1890s
and Mathews, who seems to have regarded these publications very much
as labours of love, also occupies an important place in the history of liter-
ary modernism, as a publisher of early work by both Ezra Pound and
James Joyce.56 The Bosun and the Bob-Tailed Comet (Fig. 2.2) was a chil-
dren’s picture book, written and drawn by Yeats, and published in 1905.
It is a book that has much in common not only with Yeats’ comic strip
work specifically, but with the form and language of comics generally. It is
a short story, told over 18 pages through a combination of a single illustra-
tion per page and a brief line of text. The captioned text is very brief in
each case, and in this respect bears comparison with the captions conven-
tionally accompanying comic strip panels at that time. As is often the case
with his comic strips, the sentence beneath an individual image is occa-
sionally incomplete, inviting the reader to move quickly to the text below
the subsequent image, where the sentence is continued. Here, as in the

Fig. 2.2 Jack B. Yeats, The Bosun and the Bob-Tailed Comet pps. 6–7. (Two images)
30 M. CONNERTY

comics, this is experienced by the reader as a propulsion from image to

image which reflects a quick succession of events in time, or what Scott
McCloud would characterise as a ‘moment-to-moment’ transition.57 It
was not unusual for a children’s story to be largely related through its
illustrative images, but this formal borrowing from comic strips was
unusual and is immediately striking. The illustrations themselves are
framed by a thick, black border, while the narrative unfolds in sections of
4–5 pages/panels, both elements reminiscent of the comic strip form that
Yeats had been using for over a decade at this point. The motif of the
comet, and the materiality of its tail, obviously appealed to Yeats, since he
had already used it in a one-off strip from 1895,58 and would use it again,
in 1907, in the context of a strip featuring two of his recurring characters,
The Little Stowaways.59 The Bosun as a character is also of a piece with the
maritime themes of the other Mathews publications discussed below, and
with many of the comic strip series, “The Little Stowaways” being an
example of this preoccupation, as well as being the only Yeats strip to fea-
ture protagonists who are themselves children.
Another Jack Yeats book for children, A Little Fleet (Fig. 2.3),60 is dif-
ferent in form to Bosun: here text is dominant, and there are only occa-
sional illustrations, though these are rendered in the same chapbook style,
with borders around the boldly drawn images. The fantasy narrative
extrapolates stirring adventure from Yeats’ real-life pastime of building

Fig. 2.3 Jack B. Yeats, A Little Fleet, p. 19

 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 31

small boats from wood and paper and sailing them on a stream close to his
Devon home.61 Pirates are a preoccupation of Yeats’ reflected in other
comic strips, but also in much of his illustrative work and in the plays he
wrote and designed for presentation in miniature toy theatre. During the
early 1900s Yeats performed a number of these plays for local children in
Strete, three of which were published in book form by Elkin Mathews.
These were The Treasure of the Garden (1902); James Flaunty, or The
Terror of the Seas (1903); and The Scourge of the Gulph (1911), each located
in the realms of piracy and high-seas adventure. Not only did they contain
the text of the plays to be performed, but also the individual characters
and pieces of scenery that were to be cut out and stuck to card in order
that the play could be performed in the home.
Miniature theatre plays had been a popular element of juvenile culture
throughout most of the nineteenth century, most famously published by
Pollock’s of London. They were sold in the form of large sheets from
which the characters and elements of scenery were to be cut out.
Stylistically, these publications have some elements in common with the
comics, or at least with certain aspects of cartoon art in the nineteenth
century. Characters and characterisation needed to be presented in a clear,
unequivocal manner that favours stereotyping and comic exaggeration.
Ernest Marriot points out in his book on Yeats that “[t]hose who produce
these dramas will discover many compensations. No licence is required, no
fees have to be paid, and a submission to the censor is unnecessary.”62
Comics also, in many respects, represent the incorporation into the domes-
tic sphere of the vitality and excitement associated with stage performance,
circus display, and other forms of public spectacle. In both cases these
sensations were made readily accessible via the medium of print and mass
circulation. As well as presenting his own plays for the local children, and
producing the material that was published by Elkin Mathews, Yeats was an
avid collector of toy theatre sets, characters, and texts, and his substantial
collection forms part of the Yeats Archive in Dublin.
Yeats also provided illustrations for children’s texts written by other
authors, the most pertinent here being those he contributed for Norma
Borthwick’s series of Irish reading lessons, Ceacta Beaga Gaedilge
(Fig. 2.4), a three-volume series produced in 1913. An Irish Times con-
tributor of the period, signing himself ‘Muman,’ in the course of recom-
mending various Irish-language books to the reader, suggests that these
are the only such texts available specifically for children, and singles out
Yeats’ drawings as intrinsic to their appeal, hoping that “with their
32 M. CONNERTY

Fig. 2.4 Norma Borthwick, Ceacta Beaga Gaedilge, or Irish Reading Lessons
II. (Illustration by Jack B. Yeats) p. 16

delightful illustrations and their general arrangement they should become

very popular in the National Schools and in Gaelic branches throughout
the country.”63 This is a rare case of Yeats extending his engagement with
children’s culture into the realm of pedagogy and instructional texts. The
simplicity of his images, many of which focus on children as protagonists,
and which are included on almost every page, must surely have contrib-
uted to the appeal of what would otherwise have been quite a dry
 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 33

textbook.64 The emphasis on child protagonists, and the vague allusion to

adventure that characterises some of the images, provide an interesting
contrast to the mainly adult characters that populated his comic strips dur-
ing this time. The style of the drawings, while being in a more broadly
realist, illustrative mode, nonetheless evidences a straightforward minimal-
ism that they share with much of Yeats’ contemporary comic strip work.
As with the Broadside series which he was also working on during this
period, the influence of older woodblock printing techniques is evident in
the thick lines, both in the drawings and in the frames that contain them.
Backgrounds are sketched in with a minimum of detail, while the focus is
on foreground action, rendered with concision and clarity.65 Yeats’ nostal-
gic predilection for the popular media forms of earlier ages (the miniature
theatre, the chapbook, the broadside) is in many respects comparable to
the ways that contemporary comics artists such as Chris Ware, Daniel
Clowes, and Gregory Gallant (‘Seth’) have incorporated the graphic styles
and, in some cases, the publication formats of earlier eras into their work.66
Like Yeats they often take great care over the fidelity to the earlier media
forms even as they mobilise the associated techniques in the service of new
effects and personal expression. In common with these contemporary art-
ists, Yeats was attracted to the work of earlier cartoonists, Cruikshank for
example, and was an avid collector and hoarder of popular cultural
ephemera.67
Bruce Arnold, writing in 2008, suggested of Yeats that “there is an
almost religious fervour to the way he has been memorialised by the Irish
people … [and] … this phenomenon, in part because it is a phenome-
non—is in need of reassessment.”68 He was a private figure, who did not
give many interviews during his lifetime, and was uneasy discussing his
own art or working methods. I was tempted to incorporate the phrase
‘dual identity’ into the title of this volume, with its comic book connota-
tions of secrecy and disguise, but decided it was overdramatic, and perhaps
a little gimmicky. However, it is the case that Yeats was to a great extent a
contradictory figure, and it is likely that he contributed as much as any-
body to the drawing of a veil across what is a very substantial body of
comic strip work. Yeats himself stated in 1922, some five years after con-
tributing his final strip to the comics, that “[w]hen painting takes its right-
ful place it will be in a free nation, for though pictures speak all languages
the roots of every art must be in the country of the artist, and no man can
have two countries,”69 a sentiment that appears to disavow the many years
spent in the country of his birth and his profound contribution to its
34 M. CONNERTY

popular graphic culture. Of course, one might equally argue that the state-
ment suggests his desire, as a dynamic and constantly evolving artist, to
keep moving, to find new sources of inspiration, new perspectives, and to
establish himself in a new context. In the interests of this forward propul-
sion, it may have seemed necessary to discard certain trappings of the past,
and that the time had come to put away childish things, as it were.
Regardless, it seems regrettable now that the mature Yeats should have felt
this need to such a degree, and that he did not derive pleasure, at least not
publicly, from the memory of what had after all been an extremely produc-
tive and successful career as a comic strip artist.

Notes
1. See for example William Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler
Yeats 1839–1922 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001).
2. Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Biography (London: Routledge, 1970), 7.
3. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and his Masks (London: Penguin,
1987), 24.
4. Bruce Arnold, Jack Yeats (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 10.
5. Ibid. 22.
6. There are various sketches dating from his early teens now held by the
National Gallery of Ireland, and a sketchbook which sold at a Sotheby’s
auction of Irish art in September 2017 was executed when Yeats was twelve
years old.
7. Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: His Watercolours, Drawings, and Pastels (Dublin:
Irish Academic Press, 1993), 11.
8. T.G. Rosenthal, The Art of Jack B. Yeats (London: Andre Deutsch,
1993), 4.
9. Bruce Arnold, “The Yeats Family and Modernism in Ireland,” The Moderns:
The Arts in Ireland from the 1900s to the 1970s (Dublin: Irish Museum of
Modern Art, 2010), 29.
10. Arnold, 1998 op. cit. 6.
11. Ibid. 59.
12. Comic Cuts, 10 December 1892
13. Comic Cuts, 15 May 1892
14. Pyle, 1970 op. cit. 42.
15. Pauline Swords, “An Artist’s Archive,” The Sketchbooks of Jack B. Yeats,
edited by Dónal Maguire and Pauline Swords (Dublin: National Gallery of
Ireland, 2013), 20.
16. For a comprehensive account of the American comic strip artists who exhib-
ited at the Armory Show, see Tad Suiter, ‘The Cartoonist as Artist’ (Parts
1–5) at http://www.leisurelyhistorian.net/the-­cartoonist-­as-­artist-­pt-­1.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Head of moderate size, flattened above. Neck long and slender.
Body compact, ovate. Legs long and rather slender; tibia bare in its
lower half, and reticulate; tarsus rather long, stout, roundish, covered
all round with reticulated subhexagonal scales; toes rather long,
moderately stout, covered above with numerous scutella, but at the
base reticulated; first more slender, articulated on the same plane;
second considerably shorter than third, which is in the same
proportion exceeded by the fourth. Claws moderate, arched,
compressed, laterally grooved, rather obtuse.
The head, gular sac, and a small part of the neck, destitute of
feathers. Those on the neck linear or lanceolate, small, with
disunited barbs; a tuft on the lower and fore part of the neck
recurved and silky. The feathers on the other parts are of moderate
length, ovate, rather compact above, blended beneath. Wings long
and very broad; primaries firm, broad, tapering, but rounded, the
second longest, the third next, the first a quarter of an inch shorter;
secondaries broad and broadly rounded. Tail short, even, of twelve
rather broad, abruptly rounded feathers.
Bill yellowish-grey at the base, mottled with brownish-black, in the
rest of its extent pale greenish-blue, light on the margins; base of
margin of lower mandible greenish-yellow. Iris bright carmine. Feet
pale lake; claws brownish-black. Head yellowish-green; space
around the eye and the gular sac orpiment orange; a band of black
from the lower mandible to the occiput. Feathers of the neck white.
Back and wings of a beautiful delicate rose colour; the lower parts of
a deeper tint; the tuft of recurved feathers on the fore neck, a broad
band across the wing along the cubitus, and the upper and lower tail-
coverts, of a rich and pure carmine with silky lustre. The shafts of all
the quills and scapulars are light carmine. On each side of the lower
part of the neck and fore part of the body a patch of pale ochre. Tail
feathers ochre-yellow, but at the base pale roseate, with the shafts
carmine.
Length to end of tail 30 3/4 inches, to end of wings 29 3/4, to end of
claws 36; extent of wings 53; bill 7; breadth of gape 1 3/8, depth of
pouch 2; breadth of bill at the base 1 5/8; at the end 2 1/12; bare part
of tibia 3; tarsus 4; hind toe and claw 1 10/12; second toe and claw
2 8/12; middle toe and claw 3 7/12; outer toe and claw 3 1/12; wing
from flexure 15 1/4; tail 4 3/4. Weight 4 lb. 2 oz.

The female is smaller, but resembles the male.

Length to end of tail 28 inches, to end of wings 28, to end of claws
35 3/4; extent of wings 48. Weight 3 lb.

The affinities of this remarkable bird being variously represented by

authors, it becomes a matter of considerable interest to determine its
relations according to its internal organs. The skin is thin, but tough,
and the subcutaneous cellular tissue is largely developed. In these
respects its affinity is to the Ibises and Curlews, as much at least as
to any other birds. On the roof of the mouth are two rows of blunt
papillæ, as in many Scolopacidæ. The tongue is extremely small,
being only 3 twelfths of an inch in length, but 7 twelfths in breadth at
the base, where it is emarginate and furnished with numerous
delicate papillæ, the outer much larger. The gular membrane is very
dilatable and of the same general nature as that of the Cormorants
and Pelicans, having a longitudinal series of muscular fibres along
the centre, with two layers of fasciculi interposed between the
external skin and the internal, the inner fasciculi running parallel to
the lower mandible, the outer transversely. The bill is similar to that
of the Pelican’s modified, the middle part or ridge being flattened,
and the unguis abbreviated. The breadth of the mouth is within 1 1/12
inch. The external aperture of the ear is roundish, 4 twelfths in
diameter, that of the meatus oblique, oblong, 3 twelfths across. The
œsophagus, a b, is 17 inches long (including the proventriculus, as
in all the other measurements); its diameter at the top 1 1/4 inch, at
the distance of six inches, it contracts to 5 twelfths, then for four
inches enlarges, having its greatest diameter 1 1/12 inch; between
the coracoid bones it again contracts to half an inch, and on entering
the thorax enlarges to an inch. The proventriculus is bulbiform, 1 1/2
inch long, its glandules very large, cylindrical, the longest being 1/4
inch, and 1 twelfth in diameter. The stomach, c d, is a powerful
gizzard of a roundish form, 1 inch 11 twelfths long, and 1 inch 10
twelfths broad; the muscular fibres disposed in large fasciculi all
around, but not forming distinct lateral muscles; the central tendons
very large, being 10 twelfths in diameter; the cuticular lining
excessively thick, of a rather soft texture, divided by deep
longitudinal irregular fissures, its greatest thickness being about half
an inch. The intestine d e f is very long, measuring 8 feet 9 1/2
inches, of moderate diameter, varying from 4 to 3 1/2 twelfths. It is
compactly and beautifully arranged in very numerous somewhat
concentric folds, being coiled up like a rope, the duodenum d e
curving backwards and upwards over the stomach for five inches,
then returning, and enclosing the pancreas, until under the right lobe
of the liver where it receives the biliary ducts. The cloaca is globular,
2 inches in diameter when distended; the rectum, exclusive of the
cloaca 3 1/2 inches, and having at its upper extremity two bulging
knobs in place of cœca. Now, the œsophagus and proventriculus are
those of a Numenius, the stomach that of a Heron in the
arrangement of its fasciculi, and in the softness of its epithelium; but
otherwise it differs in being much larger and more muscular. The
intestines are thicker and more muscular than those of Herons, and
differ more especially in having two cœcal appendages, which
however are extremely short, whereas the herons have merely a
single cœcal prominence.
The heart, g, is remarkably large, being 1 inch and 10 twelfths long,
1 inch and a half in breadth. The lobes of the liver, h, i, are very
large, and about equal, their greatest length being 3 inches; the gall-
bladder globular, 8 twelfths in diameter. One of the testes is 11
twelfths long, 9 twelfths broad; the other 10 twelfths by 7 twelfths;
their great size being accounted for by the individual’s having been
killed in the breeding season.
In a female of much smaller size the œsophagus is 15 inches long;
the stomach 2 inches in length, 1 inch and 9 twelfths broad; the
intestine 7 feet 7 inches. The contents of the stomach, fishes,
shrimps, and fragments of shells.
One of the most remarkable deviations from ordinary forms in this
bird is the division of the trachea previous to its entering the thorax. It
may be described as very short, a little flattened, and quite
membranous, the rings being cartilaginous and very thin. Its
diameter at the top is 5 twelfths, and it is scarcely less at the lower
part, where, half-way down the neck, is formed an inferior larynx, k,
which is scarcely enlarged. The two bronchi lm, l m, are in
consequence excessively elongated. They are compressed, 5
twelfths in diameter at the commencement, gradually contracting to 3
twelfths, and enlarging a little towards the end; and are singular in
this respect that the rings of the upper fourth are incomplete, the
tube being completed by membrane in the usual manner, whereas in
the rest of their extent, the rings are elliptical, entire, stronger, and
those at the lower part united or anchylosed on the inner side. The
rings of the trachea are 105, of the two bronchi 73 and 71. The
contractor muscles are feeble and terminate at the lower larynx; from
which no muscle extends along the bronchi, which, until they enter
the thorax, run parallel and in contact, being enclosed within a
common sheath of dense cellular tissue. The bronchi have the last
ring much enlarged, and open into a funnel, which passing
backwards and terminating in one of the abdominal cells, is
perforated above with eight or ten transverse elliptical slits, which
open into similar tubes or tunnels, opening in the same manner into
smaller tubes, and thus ramifying through the lungs.
In the male bird, of which the upper part of the trachea has been
destroyed, there are in one bronchus 80, in the other 71 rings, 20 of
the upper rings being incomplete.
The vertebræ of the neck have no resemblance to those of Herons,
nor does that part curve in the same abrupt manner; and the
sternum is in all essential respects similar to that of the Curlews,
Tringas, and other birds of that family, it having a very prominent
crest, with two deep posterior notches on each side. In fact, the
sternum of Tringa Cinclus is almost an exact miniature of it.
The compact form of the body, its great muscularity, the form of the
legs, the length and slenderness of the neck, the form and bareness
of the head, and the elongation of the bill, especially when it is
laterally viewed, all indicate an affinity to the Tantali and Numenii.
But the Spoonbills are also allied in various degrees to the Herons
and Pelicaninæ; so that they clearly present one of those remarkable
centres of radiation, demonstrative of the absurdity of quinary and
circular arrangements, founded merely on a comparison of skins.
 RED-HEADED DUCK.

Fuligula Ferina, Stephens.

PLATE CCCXXII. Male and Female.

At New Orleans, this bird is commonly known by the name of “Dos

Gris.” It arrives there in great flocks, about the first of November, and
departs late in April, or in the beginning of May. On the lakes Borgne,
St John, and Ponchartrain, it is very abundant, keeping in large
flocks, separate from the other species. In that part of the country its
food consists of small fishes, in pursuit of which it is seen constantly
diving. It is caught in different sorts of nets, and easily kept in
confinement, feeding greedily on Indian corn, whether entire or
crushed by the millstone. In 1816, many thousands of these ducks
as well as others of different species, were caught in nets by a
Frenchman, who usually sent them alive to market in cages from the
narrows of the Lakes, especially from those called “La pointe aux
herbes,” and the “Isle aux pins.” So many of them, however, were
procured by this man, that he after a while gave up sending them
alive, on account of the great difficulty he encountered in procuring a
sufficient number of cages for their accommodation.
Although Dr Richardson informs us that this species breeds “in all
parts of the fur-countries, from the fiftieth parallel to their most
northern limits,” I saw none of these birds during the spring and
summer months which I spent on the coast of Labrador. I was
equally unsuccessful in my search for it in Newfoundland. Indeed, I
have never observed it eastward of the State of Massachusetts,
although from thence it is more and more abundant the farther south
you proceed, until you reach the tributaries of the Mississippi.
Beyond the mouths of that river, these birds are rarely seen; and
when I was there in April 1837, none were observed by my party or
myself after we had left the south-west Pass on our way westward.
In the Texas none were even heard of. From these circumstances I
have inferred that, along with several other species, the Red-headed
Duck reaches the Middle and Southern States by passing overland
or following our great streams, such as the Ohio, Missouri, and
Mississippi, westward, and the North River, and others eastward,
both in its vernal and autumnal migrations. This I am the more
inclined to believe, on account of the great numbers which on such
occasions I have seen in ponds in the States of Illinois, Indiana,
Ohio, and Kentucky.
I found it abundant in the marshes near St Augustine, in East
Florida, on the 8th November 1831, when the young males of that
year had the breast and lower neck mottled with brown and blackish
feathers; and yet whilst at General Hernandez’s, in that district, on
the 20th of December, they were in almost perfect plumage. At this
latter period they were shy, and kept in company with Mallards,
American Wigeons, Scaup Ducks, and Spoonbills, generally in
shallow fresh-water ponds, at some distance from the sea shore. In
South Carolina, these ducks are now much more abundant than they
were twenty years ago, especially on the Santee River, where my
friend Dr Samuel Wilson Has shot many of them, as well as of the
Canvass-back species.
The Red-headed Duck may be said to be equally fond of salt and
fresh water, and is found in abundance, during its stay with us, on
the Chesapeake Bay, especially in the month of March, when it
associates with the Canvass-back and other Ducks, and is offered
for sale in the Baltimore markets in great numbers. There I have
seen them sold at 75 cents the pair, which was lower by 25 cents
than their price at New Orleans in April 1837.
Although they dive much and to a great depth, while in our bays and
estuaries, yet when in the shallow ponds of the interior, they are
seen dabbling the mud along the shores, much in the manner of the
Mallard; and on occasionally shooting them there, I have found their
stomach crammed with young tadpoles and small water-lizards, as
well as blades of the grasses growing around the banks. Nay, on
several occasions, I have found pretty large acorns and beech-nuts
in their throats, as well as snails, entire or broken, and fragments of
the shells of various small unios, together with much gravel.
In confinement, they do not exhibit that degree of awkwardness
attributed to them when on land. It is true that the habitual shortening
of the neck detracts from their beauty, so that in this state they
cannot be said to present a graceful appearance; yet their aspect
has always been pleasing to my sight. Their notes are rough and
coarse, and bear less resemblance to the cries of those species
which are peculiar to fresh water than those of any other of their
tribe. Their flight is performed in a hurried manner, and they start
from the water pell-mell; yet they can continue very long on wing,
and the motions of their pinions, especially at night, produce a clear
whistling sound.
The fine pair from which I made the two figures in the plate were
given me by my friend Daniel Webster, Esq. of Boston,
Massachusetts, whose talents and accomplishments are too well
known to require any eulogium from me.
The flesh of this bird is generally esteemed, insomuch that many
persons know no difference between it and that of the Canvass-back
Duck, for which it is not unfrequently sold; but I look upon it as far
inferior to that of many other ducks. Individuals of both sexes vary
much in size. On comparing American with European skins, I am
unable to perceive any difference of colour or proportions indicative
of specific distinction.

Anas Ferina, Linn. Syst. Nat. vol. i. p. 31.—Lath. Ind. Ornith. vol. ii. p. 862.
Red-headed Duck, Anas Ferina, Wils. Amer. Ornith. vol. viii. p. 110, pl. 70,
fig. 6.
Fuligula Ferina, Ch. Bonaparte, Synopsis of Birds of United States, p. 392.
Fuligula Ferina, Richards. and Swains. Fauna Bor.-Amer. vol. ii. p. 452.
The Red-headed Duck, or Pochard, Nuttall, Manual, vol. ii. p. 434.

Adult Male. Plate CCCXXII. Fig. 1.

Bill as long as the head, deeper than broad at the base, the margins
parallel, slightly dilated towards the end, which is rounded, the frontal
angles rather narrow and pointed. Upper mandible with the dorsal
line at first straight and declinate, then slightly concave, direct for a
short space near the tip, where it is incurved, the ridge broad and
concave at the base, narrowed at the middle, enlarged and convex
at the end; the sides nearly erect at the base, becoming anteriorly
more and more declinate and convex, the edges curved, with about
45 lamellæ, the unguis elliptical, and abruptly rounded at the end.
Nostrils submedial, oblong, rather large, pervious, near the ridge, in
an oblong depression covered with soft membrane. Lower mandible
flattened, being but slightly convex, with the angle very long and
rather narrow, the dorsal line very short and slightly convex, the erect
edges with about 55 inferior lamellæ; the unguis obovate and abrupt.
Head rather large, compressed, convex above. Eyes small. Neck of
moderate length, rather thick. Body full, depressed. Wings small.
Feet very short, strong, placed rather far behind; tarsus very short,
compressed, anteriorly with narrow scutella continuous with those of
the middle toe, and having another series commencing half-way
down and continuous with those of the outer toe, the rest reticulated
with angular scales. Hind toe small, with an inner expanded margin
or web; middle toe nearly double the length of the tarsus, outer a
little shorter. Claws small, compressed, that of the first toe very small
and curved, of the third toe larger and more expanded than the rest.
Plumage dense, soft, blended. Feathers of the upper part of the
head small and rather compact, of the rest of the head and neck
small, blended, and glossy. Wings shortish, narrow, pointed; primary
quills strong, tapering, the first longest, the second almost as long,
the rest rapidly diminishing; secondary quills broad and rounded, the
inner elongated and tapering. Tail very short, much rounded, or
wedge-shaped, of fourteen feathers.
Bill light greyish-blue, with a broad band of black at the end, and a
dusky patch anterior to the nostrils. Iris orange-yellow. Head and
neck all round, for more than half its length of a rich brownish-red,
glossed with carmine above. A broad belt of brownish-black
occupies the lower part of the neck, and the fore part of the body, of
which the posterior part is of the same colour, more extended on the
back than under the tail. Back and scapulars pale greyish-white, very
minutely traversed by dark brownish-grey lines; the sides and
abdomen similar, the undulations gradually fading away into the
greyish-white of the middle of the breast; upper wing-coverts
brownish-grey, the feathers faintly undulated with whitish toward the
end. Primary quills brownish-grey, dusky along the outer web and at
the end; secondaries ash-grey, narrowly tipped with white, the outer
faintly tinged with yellow, and almost imperceptibly dotted with
whitish, four or five of the inner of a purer tint tinged with blue, and
having a narrow brownish-black line along the margin; the innermost
like the scapulars but more dusky. Tail brownish-grey, towards the
end lighter. Axillar feathers and lower wing-coverts white. Feet dull
greyish-blue, the webs dusky, the claws black.
Length to end of tail 20 inches, to end of wings 18 1/2, to end of
claws 22; extent of wings 33; wing from flexure 9 2/12; tail 2 8/12; bill
along the ridge 2, from the tips of the frontal processes 2 4/12; tarsus
1/
1 1/2, first toe and claw 10/12; second toe 1 10/12, its claw 5 /12, third
2

1/2 1/2
toe 2 5/12, its claw 4 /12; fourth toe 2 6/12, its claw 3 /12. Weight
2 1/2 lb.

Adult Female. Plate CCCXXII. Fig. 2.

The female has the bill of a dusky bluish-grey, with a broad band of
black at the end, and a narrow transverse blue line, narrower than in
the male. Iris yellow. Feet as in the male, the head and upper part of
the neck dull reddish-brown, darker above, and lighter on the fore
part of the cheeks and along a streak behind the eye. The rest of the
neck all round, and the upper parts in general, are dull greyish-
brown, the feathers paler at their extremity; the flanks and fore part
of the neck dull reddish-brown, the feathers broadly tipped with pale
greyish-brown. The wings are as in the male, but of a darker tint, and
without undulations. The tail as in the male. Lower wing-coverts light
grey, those in the middle white; middle of breast greyish-white, hind
part of abdomen light brownish-grey.
Length to end of tail 21 inches, to end of claws 23 1/2; extent of
wings 32 1/2. Weight 2 lb. 7 oz.
The following account of the digestive organs is taken from a British
specimen, an adult male, examined by Mr Macgillivray in March
1836.

The tongue is 1 inch and 10 twelfths long, 6 1/2 twelfths broad, its
sides furnished with two series of bristly filaments. The œsophagus
is 11 inches long, with a diameter of nearly 5 twelfths at the top, 8
twelfths at the lower part of the neck. The proventriculus has a
diameter of 9 twelfths; its glandules are cylindrical, and 2 twelfths
long. The stomach is an extremely powerful gizzard, of an elliptical
form, compressed, oblique, its length 2 1/2 inches, its breadth 1 3/4;
its lateral muscles more than half an inch thick; the cuticular coat
rather thin, but very tough, slightly rugous, with two circular thicker
parts opposite the centres of the lateral muscles. The upper part
forms a small sac, from which the duodenum comes off; the pylorus
without valve. The intestine is 5 feet 4 inches long, narrowest in its
upper part where its diameter is 4 twelfths, widest at the middle,
where it is 6 1/2 twelfths, near the cœca 5/12. The rectum is 5 1/2
inches long, its diameter 6 twelfths; the cœca 7 inches long, nearly
cylindrical, 4 twelfths in diameter, a little narrower at the
commencement.
 BLACK SKIMMER OR RAZOR-BILLED
SHEARWATER.

Rynchops nigra, Linn.

PLATE CCCXXIII. Male.

This bird, one of the most singularly endowed by nature, is a

constant resident on all the sandy and marshy shores of our more
southern States, from South Carolina to the Sabine River, and
doubtless also in Texas, where I found it quite abundant in the
beginning of spring. At this season parties of Black Skimmers extend
their movements eastward as far as the sands of Long Island,
beyond which however I have not seen them. Indeed in
Massachusetts and Maine this bird is known only to such navigators
as have observed it in the southern and tropical regions.
To study its habits therefore, the naturalist must seek the extensive
sand-bars, estuaries, and mouths of the rivers of our Southern
States, and enter the sinuous bayous intersecting the broad marshes
along their coasts. There, during the warm sunshine of the winter
days, you will see thousands of Skimmers, covered as it were with
their gloomy mantles, peaceably lying beside each other, and so
crowded together as to present to your eye the appearance of an
immense black pall accidentally spread on the sand. Such times are
their hours of rest, and I believe of sleep, as, although partially
diurnal, and perfectly able to discern danger by day, they rarely feed
then, unless the weather be cloudy. On the same sands, yet apart
from them, equal numbers of our common Black-headed Gulls may
be seen enjoying the same comfort in security. Indeed the Skimmers
are rarely at such times found on sand or gravel banks which are not
separated from the neighbouring shores by some broad and deep
piece of water. I think I can safely venture to say that in such places,
and at the periods mentioned, I have seen not fewer than ten
thousand of these birds in a single flock. Should you now attempt to
approach them, you will find that as soon as you have reached within
twice the range of your long duck-gun, the crowded Skimmers
simultaneously rise on their feet, and watch all your movements. If
you advance nearer, the whole flock suddenly taking to wing, fill the
air with their harsh cries, and soon reaching a considerable height,
range widely around, until, your patience being exhausted, you
abandon the place. When thus taking to wing in countless
multitudes, the snowy white of their under parts gladdens your eye,
but anon, when they all veer through the air, the black of their long
wings and upper parts produces a remarkable contrast to the blue
sky above. Their aërial evolutions on such occasions are peculiar
and pleasing, as they at times appear to be intent on removing to a
great distance, then suddenly round to, and once more pass almost
over you, flying so close together as to appear like a black cloud, first
ascending, and then rushing down like a torrent. Should they see
that you are retiring, they wheel a few times close over the ground,
and when assured that there is no longer any danger, they alight
pell-mell, with wings extended upwards, but presently closed, and
once more huddling together they lie down on the ground, to remain
until forced off by the tide. When the Skimmers repose on the shores
of the mainland during high-water, they seldom continue long on the
same spot, as if they felt doubtful of security; and a person watching
them at such times might suppose that they were engaged in
searching for food.
No sooner has the dusk of evening arrived than the Skimmers begin
to disperse, rise from their place of rest singly, in pairs, or in parties
from three or four to eight or ten, apparently according to the degree
of hunger they feel, and proceed in different directions along parts of
the shores previously known to them, sometimes going up tide-rivers
to a considerable distance. They spend the whole night on wing,
searching diligently for food. Of this I had ample and satisfactory
proof when ascending the St John River in East Florida, in the
United States’ Schooner the Spark. The hoarse cries of the
Skimmers never ceased more than an hour, so that I could easily
know whether they were passing upwards or downwards in the dark.
And this happened too when I was at least a hundred miles from the
mouth of the river.
Being aware, previously to my several visits to the peninsula of the
Floridas and other parts of our southern coasts where the Razor-bills
are abundant, of the observations made on this species by M.
Lesson, I paid all imaginable attention to them, always aided with an
excellent glass, in order to find whether or not they fed on bivalve
shell-fish found in the shallows of sand-bars and other places at low
water; but not in one single instance did I see any such occurrence,
and in regard to this matter I agree with Wilson in asserting that,
while with us, these birds do not feed on shell-fish. M. Lesson’s
words are as follows:—“Quoique le Bec-en-ciseaux semble
defavorisé par la forme de son bec, nous acquimes la preuve qu’il
savait s’en servir avec avantage et avec la plus grande adresse. Les
plages sabloneuses de Peuce sont en effect remplies de Macetres,
coquilles bivalves, que la marée descendente laisse presque à sec
dans des petites mares; le Bec-en-ciseaux très au fait de cet
phenomène, se place aupres de ces mollusques, attend que leur
valves s’entrouvrent un peu, et profite aussitot de ce movement en
enforçant la lame inferieure et tranchante de son bec entre les
valves qui se reserrent. L’oiseaux enleve alors la coquille, la frappe
sur la grève, coupe le ligament du mollusque, et peut ensuite avaler
celui-ci sans obstacle. Plusieurs fois nous avons été temoins de cet
instinct très perfectionné.”
While watching the movements of the Black Skimmer as it was
searching for food, sometimes a full hour before it was dark, I have
seen it pass its lower mandible at an angle of about 45 degrees into
the water, whilst its moveable upper mandible was elevated a little
above the surface. In this manner, with wings raised and extended, it
ploughed as it were, the element in which its quarry lay to the extent
of several yards at a time, rising and falling alternately, and that as
frequently as it thought it necessary for securing its food when in
sight of it; for I am certain that these birds never immerse their lower
mandible until they have observed the object of their pursuit, for
which reason their eyes are constantly directed downwards like
those of Terns and Gannets. I have at times stood nearly an hour by
the side of a small pond of salt water having a communication with
the sea or a bay, while these birds would pass within a very few
yards of me, then apparently quite regardless of my presence, and
proceed fishing in the manner above described. Although silent at
the commencement of their pursuit, they become noisy as the
darkness draws on, and then give out their usual call notes, which
resemble the syllables hurk, hurk, twice or thrice repeated at short
intervals, as if to induce some of their companions to follow in their
wake. I have seen a few of these birds glide in this manner in search
of prey over a long salt-marsh bayou, or inlet, following the whole of
its sinuosities, now and then lower themselves to the water, pass
their bill along the surface, and on seizing a prawn or a small fish,
instantly rise, munch and swallow it on wing. While at Galveston
Island, and in the company of my generous friend Edward Harris
and my son, I observed three Black Skimmers, which having noticed
a Night Heron passing over them, at once rose in the air, gave chase
to it, and continued their pursuit for several hundred yards, as if
intent on overtaking it. Their cries during this chase differed from
their usual notes, and resembled the barkings of a very small dog.
The flight of the Black Skimmer is perhaps more elegant than that of
any water bird with which I am acquainted. The great length of its
narrow wings, its partially elongated forked tail, its thin body and
extremely compressed bill, all appear contrived to assure it that
buoyancy of motion which one cannot but admire when he sees it on
wing. It is able to maintain itself against the heaviest gale; and I
believe no instance has been recorded of any bird of this species
having been forced inland by the most violent storm. But, to observe
the aërial movements of the Skimmer to the best advantage, you
must visit its haunts in the love season. Several males, excited by
the ardour of their desires, are seen pursuing a yet unmated female.
The coy one, shooting aslant to either side, dashes along with
marvellous speed, flying hither and thither, upwards, downwards, in
all directions. Her suitors strive to overtake her; they emit their love-
cries with vehemence: you are gladdened by their softly and tenderly
enunciated ha, ha, or the hack, hack, cae, cae, of the last in the
chase. Like the female they all perform the most curious zigzags, as
they follow in close pursuit, and as each beau at length passes her in
succession, he extends his wings for an instant, and in a manner
struts by her side. Sometimes a flock is seen to leave a sand-bar,
and fly off in a direct course, each individual apparently intent on
distancing his companions; and then their mingling cries of ha, ha,
hack, hack, cae, cae, fill the air. I once saw one of these birds fly
round a whole flock that had alighted, keeping at the height of about
twenty yards, but now and then tumbling as if its wings had suddenly
failed, and again almost upsetting, in the manner of the Tumbler
Pigeon.
On the 5th of May 1837, I was much surprised to find a large flock of
Skimmers alighted and apparently asleep, on a dry grassy part of the
interior of Galveston Island in Texas, while I was watching some
marsh hawks that were breeding in the neighbourhood. On returning
to the shore, however, I found that the tide was much higher than
usual, in consequence of a recent severe gale, and had covered all
the sand banks on which I had at other times observed them resting
by day.
The instinct or sagacity which enables the Razor-bills, after being
scattered in all directions in quest of food during a long night, often at
great distances from each other, to congregate again towards
morning, previously to their alighting on a spot to rest, has appeared
to me truly wonderful; and I have been tempted to believe that the
place of rendezvous had been agreed upon the evening before.
They have a great enmity towards Crows and Turkey Buzzards when
at their breeding ground, and on the first appearance of these
marauders, some dozens of Skimmers at once give chase to them,
rarely desisting until quite out of sight.
Although parties of these birds remove from the south to betake
themselves to the eastern shores, and breed there, they seldom
arrive at Great Egg Harbour before the middle of May, or deposit
their eggs until a month after, or about the period when, in the
Floridas and on the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, the young
are hatched. To these latter sections of the country we will return,
Reader, to observe their actions at this interesting period. Were I to
speak of the vast numbers that congregate for the purpose of
breeding, some of my readers might receive the account with as little
favour as they have accorded to that which I have given of the wild
pigeons; and therefore I will present you with a statement by my
friend the Rev. John Bachman, which he has inserted in my journal.
“These birds are very abundant, and breed in great numbers on the
sea islands at Bull’s Bay. Probably twenty thousand nests were seen
at a time. The sailors collected an enormous number of their eggs.
The birds screamed all the while, and whenever a Pelican or Turkey
Buzzard passed near, they assailed it by hundreds, pouncing on the
back of the latter, that came to rob them of their eggs, and pursued
them fairly out of sight. They had laid on the dry sand, and the
following morning we observed many fresh-laid eggs, when some
had been removed the previous afternoon.” Then, Reader, judge of
the deafening angry cries of such a multitude, and see them all over
your head begging for mercy as it were, and earnestly urging you
and your cruel sailors to retire and leave them in the peaceful charge
of their young, or to settle on their lovely rounded eggs, should it rain
or feel chilly.
The Skimmer forms no other nest than a slight hollow in the sand.
The eggs, I believe, are always three, and measure an inch and
three quarters in length, an inch and three-eighths in breadth. As if to
be assimilated to the colours of the birds themselves, they have a
pure white ground, largely patched or blotched with black or very
dark umber, with here and there a large spot of a light purplish tint.
They are as good to eat as those of most Gulls, but inferior to the
eggs of Plovers and other birds of that tribe. The young are clumsy,
much of the same colour as the sand on which they lie, and are not
able to fly until about six weeks, when you now perceive their
resemblance to their parents. They are fed at first by the
regurgitation of the finely macerated contents of the gullets of the old
birds, and ultimately pick up the shrimps, prawns, small crabs, and
fishes dropped before them. As soon as they are able to walk about,
they cluster together in the manner of the young of the Common
Gannet, and it is really marvellous how the parents can distinguish
them individually on such occasions. This bird walks in the manner
of the Terns, with short steps, and the tail slightly elevated. When
gorged and fatigued, both old and young birds are wont to lie flat on
the sand, and extend their bills before them; and when thus reposing
in fancied security, may sometimes be slaughtered in great numbers
by the single discharge of a gun. When shot at while on wing, and
brought to the water, they merely float, and are easily secured. If the