The collection is significant for its sizeable number of works by Jack B. Yeats many of which record experiences and memories of his time living in Sligo and its environs.

Paul Henry, Estella Solomons, Sean Keating , among many others are also represented in the collection which is exhibited in purpose-built galleries.

The collection is available, by application, for scholarly research.

Exhibitions from the collection are changed several times per year.

Niland Galleries

The Niland Galleries Current Displays

Jack B Yeats – ‘A thought of Sligo’

2007 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jack B Yeats one of Ireland’s finest twentieth century painters.  This exhibition, which looks at the influence of Sligo on his work, commemorates his life and career.

Yeats was the youngest son of the portrait painter John Butler Yeats and the brother of the writer William Butler Yeats.  Though he was born in London, Jack spent most of his childhood in Sligo in the care of his maternal grandparents.  It was a place that influenced him deeply, leading him in later life to declare that he never produced a painting without it having in it  “at least a thought of Sligo”. 

Jack spent much of his childhood travelling about Sligo with his grandfather, a wealthy merchant.  The young artist must have been captivated by the landscape and the characters he encountered here as throughout his career he returned to the memories of his Sligo days for inspiration again and again.

Jack had a particulary interest in the people and rituals of everyday life, painting street sellers, sailors, funerals, travelling fairs, circuses and the races.  We can see this interest emerging in his early watercolours like The Strand Races, West of Ireland, which depicts the Culleenamore Races in Strandhill Co Sligo, Market Day, 1906, and A Political Meeting, County Sligo, 1905.

Yeats’ early paintings were always executed in watercolours, and he was over thirty by the time he began to work regularly in oils.  For years his style remained essentially conservative, but in the mid-1920s a profound change began to take place. Yeats’s handling of paint grew much freer, his forms were defined by brushstrokes rather than by line, his colours grew richer and more luminous and his earlier realism gradually gave way to a moody, intimate and highly personal romanticism. These tendencies grew even more marked over the next two decades, until in his final years when his subject-matter is sometimes buried and almost obliterated by rich impasto, heavy brushwork and flame-like areas of colour. 

Memory was an important part of Yeats’ work and throughout his adult life he kept small sketchbooks as a visual diaries.  Throughout his life he returned to this store of inspiration creating works such as Leaving the Far Point, one of his later works based on his memories of a day spent walking on the beach at Rosses Point with his wife and his uncle George.  Like this painting many of his later works deal with the themes of death and loss.  Perhaps at this point in his life it was his exploration of the natural cycle of life that caused him to continue to look back at his carefree early life in Sligo.

Landscapes of the West of Ireland

The west of Ireland has been a hugely important place in the history of Irish painting. With the Gaelic Revival at the turn of the twentieth century artists and writers began to take a renewed interest in the west of Ireland.  George Russell, whose work Shining Shallows can be seen here was among the major figures of the literary and artistic world who began to travel westward for inspiration

Throughout the early twentieth century artists began to look to the west in order to find what they believed to be the ‘real’ Ireland, a large amount of artists began to take up residence along the west coast.

Paul Henry, one of Ireland’s best known twentieth century landscape painters, spent ten years living on Achill Island off the coast of Mayo.  Henry was captivated by the beauty of the Achill landscape and by the rapidly changing play of light on the water and the sea.  His landscape paintings from this time usually concentrate on just one or two elements - a mountain, lake or cottage, with at least half the painting usually given over to a vast cloudy sky.

Other artists whose work was deeply influenced by the people and the landscape of the west throughout the twentieth century include Maurice MacGonigal who followed his teacher Sean Keating westward to portray the people and landscape of the Aran Islands.  The effect of the west on painting continued in the latter half of the twentieth century with painters like Gerard Dillon and Patrick Collins gaining inspiration from Connemara and Sligo respectively 

Today many of Ireland’s finest contemporary landscape painters such as Sean McSweeney and Barrie Cooke acknowledge “the inexhaustible fund of inspiration” available to them in the West and continue to live and work here

Admission to Exhibitions is Free