1839–1922 · Irish portrait painter · father of W. B. and Jack B. Yeats
John Butler Yeats trained as a lawyer, took up painting in 1867, and spent his life as a portrait painter and an inexhaustible letter-writer — father of the poet W. B. Yeats and the painter Jack B. Yeats. In 1907 he sailed to New York with his daughter Lily and never returned to Ireland, dying there in 1922. His talk-on-paper made enough of an impression that Ezra Pound culled a Cuala Press volume from it in 1917, warning in his editor’s note that snatching at “salient thoughts” risked making a preacher of a man whose letters had only “the air of leisure.”