YEATS, Jack B. James Flaunty or The Terror of the Western Seas. Jack B. Yeats’s Plays In the Old Manner. With hand-coloured cover and illustrations by Jack B. Yeats. [His First Book]

YEATS’ FIRST BOOK A LITTLE PLAY ABOUT PIRATES FOR CHILDREN

London: Elkin Matthews, (1901). Foolscap octavo. First and only edition. pp. 16. Hand-coloured pictorial wrappers after a design by Yeats. In original envelope with colour illustration. With portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson loosely inserted. A fine copy in a good slightly edge-worn envelope with some tears.
Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), undoubtedly Ireland’s most famous painter, a committed nationalist and brother of one of Ireland’s greatest poets W.B. Yeats, was born in London and at the age of eight returned to Sligo where he was brought up by his grandparents, the Pollexfens. In his paintings and drawings the love of the common people shines through. It was the everyday life of Ireland which sparked his genius - the fairs, circuses, race meetings, sailors and farmers, tramps and beggars, trams and city streets, shopkeepers, coachmen, boxers and ballad singers, etc. etc. all feature in his work, in which he expresses an intense sympathy for the underdog, the outcast and the outsider. James Flaunty was the first of Jack Yeats’ pirate plays for young people, and his first separate publication, of legendary scarcity, issued at a time when he was almost unknown as a painter. The hand-colouring is by Yeats himself. When published the version coloured by the author was five times the price of the uncoloured copies.

[L4 8B in Box]