Anne Yeats

Who was Anne Yeats?

Anne Butler Yeats was an Irish painter and stage designer. She was a daughter of the poet William Butler Yeats and a niece of the painter Jack B. Yeats, niece of Lily Yeats an embroiderer associated with the Celtic Revival, and botanic artist Elizabeth Yeats. Her brother Michael Yeats was a politician.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Anne Yeats trained in the Royal Hibernian Academy school from 1933–36 and worked as a stage designer with the Abbey before taking up painting full-time in 1941; she had a touching naive expressionist style and was interested in representing domestic humanity. She designed many of the covers for the books of Irish-language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill over a twenty-year period from 1958.

The Royal Hibernian Academy held a retrospective of her work in 1995, as did the National Gallery of Ireland in 2002. She donated her collection of Jack B. Yeats' sketch books to the National Gallery of Ireland, leading to the creation of the Yeats Museum within the Gallery. Her brother, Michael, in turn, donated her sketchbooks to the Museum.

Yeats never married.