Sir, – I see that paintings by Jack B Yeats and personal effects of WB Yeats are shortly to be sold privately.
Some years back when I was busy with research on Jack B Yeats’s art, Anne Yeats, WB’s daughter, generously invited me to her Dalkey home to consult her wonderful personal archive of letters and other family documents. She set me down with a pile of these at a fine old wooden desk in front of a window. Later, when I had finished, she told me that this had been her father’s writing desk. I had unknowingly been sitting all this time where WB Yeats had worked!
It was a thrilling thought. Yeats’s desk, so intimately associated with the poet, has an aura of magic, and it would be negligent to allow it to leave Ireland where it belongs. – Yours, etc,
TRICIA CUSACK,
Greystones,
Co Wicklow.