Darrynane (In the Sun)

Yeats painted the ordinary things of life, but saw them in an extraordinary way, leaving it to the viewer to construe the meaning. His style became more strikingly personal in the mid 1920S, when landscape for him became a vehicle for introspection, and he tended to choose views for their emotional and historical associations. This view is preoccupied with the prevailing light rather than with the landscape per se, recalling, perhaps symbolically, a particular moment when the sun shone. He takes the lemon yellow in the sky, and reflects it onto the sea, which is pierced by black rocks jutting out from the grey of the water. Darrynane (In the Sun), with its gleaming wreath of floating sun, is one of the small precursors of the great visionary views of his late period, which are figurative, and where man and earth share emotion together.