Sunday Morning is based on sights that Jack Yeats would have seen and sketched on his annual travels to the western counties of Ireland from the 1890s to the 1920s. He was aware that many aspects of rural life were changing under the impact of modernity. The painting depicts a group of young women and a horse-drawn cart travelling on a country road in the West of Ireland. The title reveals that it is a Sunday morning and the women are presumably heading to mass although there are no references to religion in the painting. The expanse of the Atlantic Ocean dominates the scene with a myriad of little islands emerging from the sea. The low-lying terrain suggests the landscape of west Galway around Lettermore or Ballyconneely. A well-kept cottage with a traditional thatched roof is at the edge of the road. Its thatch is weighted down by stones to prevent it becoming damaged in the storms that prevail in such regions. A small mound of turf stands outside the doorway. Yeats pays close attention to such technical details. One might describe his approach as ethnographical, prompted as it is, by a keen curiosity into life in this remote part of the world.

Two female figures are shown in the act of ascending the car as it travels along. One of their feet is on the ground, while they endeavour to lift themselves onto the seat with their other foot placed on the foot rest. The driver has his head turned around to check that his passengers can board the car safely. A third woman runs along behind. In his index of paintings, Yeats noted for this work that the ‘girls sit in car.’ (H. Pyle, Jack B. Yeats. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, 1, p.135.). The three figures to the rear of the vehicle have their heads inclined towards each other as if in conversation or exchanging greetings. A fourth female figure is seated in the cart, her statuesque head silhouetted against the grey skies. The women are subtly differentiated from each other through their diversely coloured skirts, hair colour and demeanour. They wear their best Sunday clothes, boots and long mid-calf length wool skirts and dark shawls. Their physical movement conveys their vitality and energy and is a good example of how Yeats’s depicted Irish womanhood in the 1920s as a force of modernity and vibrancy.

The apex of the composition is provided by the noble head of the horse, that steadily trots along the empty road. Its mane is blown by a gentle breeze as are the women’s shawls and skirts. This suggests the bracing air of the coast and the speed with which they move. A sense of excit.mes nt and community is conveyed by the physical and psychological interaction between the figures in Sunday Morning.

Subtle combinations of colour evoke the symbiotic relationship between the figures and the surrounding terrain. Grey tones recur in the cottage walls, the roadway, the stone wall, and the sky. This moves to blue in other parts of the sky, in the sea and in the skirt of one woman and the car itself. Warmer tones of yellow are introduced by the thatched roof, brown skirt, golden-brown hair of one of the women, and the deep chestnut brown of the horse. Strong greens in the grassy bank and on the tiny islands convey the sodden nature of the land. The colours are applied in rich brushstrokes, their deep sinuous forms are evident in the surface of the paint. This sculpting of pigment adds to the feeling of movement and dynamism that is manifest not only in the moving car and the figures but in the natural world that surrounds them.

Dr. Róisín Kennedy