Page "Jack Butler Yeats" Paragraph 3

From around 1920, he developed into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism.

He was sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause, but not politically active.

However, he believed that ' a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints ', and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helped articulate a modern Dublin of the 20th century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man.

When he died, Samuel Beckett wrote that " Yeats is the great of our time ... he brings light as only the great dare to bring light to the issueless predicament of existence.