Danbury Library Blog

We are all familiar with work of William Butler Yeats, Irish poet, dramatist and one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In the course of doing resaerch on my family history for my Genealogy program I discovered that my paternal grandfather came from Cloonaghil in County Sligo. Yeats lived in Sligo while a young man and grew to love it. But what I did not know was that Yeats had a younger brother, Jack Butler Yeats, who was also a poet, dramatist, novelist as well as a painter. He was an influence on Joyce & Samuel Beckett and is the most important Irish painter of the twentieth century but his reputation is overshadowed by his elder brother. He loved Sligo and said that its landscape had "made him a painter."