The Yeats Family in Boston

In spring 2026, Collaborating in Conflict: The Yeats Family and the Public Arts opens at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. This landmark exhibition celebrates the remarkable impact the Yeats family had on cultural life and the public arts in twentieth-century Ireland. Collaborating in Conflict showcases the work of three generations of the Yeats Family, from portrait painter John Butler Yeats (1839-1922) and his four talented children – William, Lily, Elizabeth and Jack – to acclaimed painter and designer Anne Yeats (1919-2001). This major international exhibition features significant loans from the National Gallery of Ireland's extraordinary Yeats Archive, including sketchbooks, embroidery and theatre design. 

Explore below selected highlights from the Yeats Archive, now on view at the McMullen Museum of Art in Boston!

Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957) is Ireland's most celebrated artist, renowned for his large-scale expressionist oil paintings of enigmatic subjects drawn from his personal memories and imagination. Famously reserved, Jack rarely commented on his paintings or practice. However, his personal archive offers remarkable insights into his interests, hobbies and career trajectory. His sketchbooks demonstrate that the artist was a frequent theatregoer in Dublin, London and during his 1904 visit to New York. He was particularly enthusiastic about miniature theatre, building his own modal theatre to perform miniature plays for local school children in Devon. Jack began his career as a freelance illustrator, comic artist, and sporting artist, finding inspiration in promotional ephemera and advertisements. An assortment of fruit wrappers, tobacco labels, tickets and newspaper clippings pasted into scrapbooks reveal the artist's fascination with commercial design and typography.

Elizabeth C. Yeats (1868–1940) was a publisher and painter who established the renowned Dun Emer Press. Elizabeth trained in the teachings of German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel (inventor of the kindergarten), and between 1896 and 1900 she published a series of children's manuals on brushwork painting. Together with her sister Lily and friend Evelyn Gleeson, Elizabeth co-founded Dun Emer Guild, operating the printing press at the celebrated Irish craft collective. Dun Emer Press (later Cuala Press) published contemporary Irish literature, and became a major vehicle of the Irish Literary Revival. During her time at Dun Emer, Elizabeth hand-painted a delicate folding fan, inspired by her brother William Butler Yeats's 1887 poem Anashuya and Vijaya. She also painted landscapes in watercolour, and created illustrations and embroidery designs for Dun Emer and later Cuala Industries.
 

Susan 'Lily' Yeats (1866–1949) was an embroiderer and designer, and an influential figure in the Irish Arts & Crafts movement. She trained at William Morris & Co. in London, and worked for several years as embroidery assistant to May Morris. She moved to Ireland in 1902 to co-found Dun Emer Guild, and after the Yeats sisters split from Gleeson in 1908, she ran the embroidery division of Cuala Industries. Lily usually executed the designs of others, such as her sister Elizabeth, her sister-in-law Mary Cottenham Yeats, or her former employer William Morris. In later years, she experimented with increasingly modernist compositions, such as a 1922 design after Russian poet and mosaicist Boris Anrep's (1883-1969) Fiza Playing his Harp. Lily was an exceptional colourist, and her exquisitely detailed embroideries often resemble painting in thread. At Dun Emer and Cuala, she trained other women in the delicate and labour-intensive craft. Her greatest protégé was her cousin and ward, Ruth Lane Poole (née Pollexfen).

Mary Cottenham 'Cottie' Yeats (1867-1947) was a skilled artist, designer and illustrator. Born in England, she met Jack B. Yeats at the Chiswick School of Arts, and the artistic couple married in 1894. Cottie brought her creative skills to Dun Emer and Cuala Industries, contributing illustrations and embroidery designs that reveal a rare mastery of line, volume, colour and movement. Of particular note are her charming illustrations for A Broad Sheet (1904), her lively female saints for the Loughrea Cathedral sodality banners (1902-04), and her dynamic Seagull Portiere embroidery design (c. 1903), reminiscent of Hokusai’s nineteenth-century woodblock print The Great Wave. 

Anne Yeats (1919-2001) was a painter and stage designer, and founder member of Graphic Studio Dublin. The daughter of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), she began her career in theatre design, working initially for the Abbey Theatre and later the Peacock, Olympia and Gaiety. In 1948 she designed the costumes for Austin Clarke's As the Crow Flies, a play exploring Irish myth, folklore, misguided adventure and betrayal. Anne's design for the mythic Crow of Achill reflects the ominous character who tricks the Mother Eagle, with tragic consequences. Like her uncle Jack, Anne captured the world around her in a wide variety of sketchbooks, which she termed her 'think books'.

Postcards from around the world demonstrate that the Yeatses were a cosmopolitan family. Jack B. Yeats travelled to Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the United States of America, documenting his international trips in his pocket-sized sketchbooks. Lily and Elizabeth represented Dun Emer and Cuala at art fairs and international exhibitions in London and New York, cultivating international clients and patrons for their craft collective. In 1908, at the age of 69, John Butler Yeats accompanied Lily on a trip to New York. While Lily returned to Ireland after several months, her father ultimately stayed in New York until his death in 1922. Anne Yeats travelled the farthest of all; she was a member of the Irish delegation to China, marking the seventh anniversary of the Chinese Republic in 1956. Her poignant postcards home to Jack in Portobello Nursing Home reveal the close bond the artist shared with her uncle.

Collaborating in Conflict: The Yeats Family and the Public Arts is on view at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College from 1 February to 31 May 2026.