![Jack Butler Yeats - The Learner [1929]](http://farm1.staticflickr.com/570/21660267042_72a06b5bde_o.jpg)
With lively and colourful brushwork, Jack Butler Yeats (1871 - 1957) depicts a father teaching his son how to manage a horse and cart; to the right a woman watches them pass. The fluidity of the painting animates the composition and emphasises the energy of the horse as it trots confidently by. The additional inclusion of various coloured pigments anticipates the increasingly bold palette Yeats employed in the years ahead. By the time of the present work, Yeats's break from his earlier delineated and more limited colour palette was well under way and The Learner epitomises the radical painterly technique of Yeats' most ambitious paintings.
[Sotheby’s, London - Oil on panel, 23 x 35.5 cm]