THE REPUTATION of Jack Yeats has gained a kind of powerful second wind in the last decade and a half, as it emerged from the period of relative eclipse which followed his death in 1957.
For his close admirers he was never out of favour anyway. But Yeats was, in a sense, a late Romantic, and in the grey 1950s and Swinging Sixties romanticism seemed as relevant to contemporary issues and tastes as the Albigensian Heresy is to 20th century thought.
It is half forgotten already how high he ranked in his own day, and how widely acclaimed he was in the last 30 years of his life scarcely anybody would have questioned that he was Ireland's greatest painter, living or dead.
His prestige, in fact, was almost comparable with his elder brother's in poetry.
The French government gave him the Legion of Honour. Sir Kenneth Clark and other influential English admirers organised a large exhibition of his work in London in the late 1940s, and he was well known to American collectors from the time he exhibited in the historic Armory Show in New York in 1913.
Yeats was, in fact, an international figure, and Kokoschka was only one of the many leading artists who paid him homage; Beckett and Synge and the poet John Masefield were among his personal friends.
As a personality Yeats was quiet and rather private, but with a certain sympathetic magnetism and whimsical humour which drew people of all sorts to him. Louis MacNeice in The Strings are False has recorded his easy charm as a host.
Yeats paid for his popularity with the inevitable reaction after his death. Tastes in art had changed rapidly for a time the heavyweight scale and rhetoric of the new American painting conquered the world, and after that the international Pop Culture called the tune.
The tide began to turn again with the massive centenary exhibition mounted at the National Gallery of Ireland. Though the new generation of English critics in particular was slow to respond, their last reservations were steamrolled by the success of the Whitechapel Gallery show a few years ago.
Plainly, Yeats was back and would not easily be dislodged again.
The £200,000 odd paid this week in London for a relatively early picture is only one more proof that this steady rise in his stock has been reflected in the salesrooms.
It is not an exceptional price by international standards, compared with the figures fetched by Francis Bacon or certain postwar New York painters, let alone Picasso or Matisse. But then the art market went through a bad phase from the late 1980s and has only recently begun to recover from this cycle of inflation deflation.
In my own opinion, the time is not far distant when the finest Yeats paintings will fetch £1 million or more - though the fact that he had such a large output (over 1,000 oils) may tell against him on the market.
It is no secret that the late Victor Waddington - and probably, to some extent, his heirs exercised a strong influence on sales of his work.
Waddington was his Dublin dealer. Though he moved to London about the time of Yeats's death, he still held many of his pictures and was careful about "feeding" them on to the market.
In spite of this stewardship, there was a period in the early and middle 1980s when so many came up for sale that a slump seemed likely. But this phase, too, passed and Yeats is now keenly sought after by shrewd collectors in the business world, particularly Irish ones.
A Yeats museum is already planned by the National Gallery and should be completed by the end of the decade.
The last 20 years have seen a new surge of interest in Irish painting, especially from the first half of this century: Orpen, Lavery, Osborne, Paul Henry have all become news again.
Yet Yeats is ultimately a special case and a unique figure somehow, he is the Irish painter in a way they are not.
His instantly recognisable style, particularly in the late paintings with their clots and streaks of colour, thick impastoes and haunting, sometimes enigmatic imagery, seems to speak hypnotically to French, Germans, English, Americans, Scandinavians and even Japanese in a way that no other Irish painter does. Yeats holds the key to an emotional and visionary world which is sui generis.
Beginning as a kind of late, provincial Impressionist, he ended up as a Modernist comparable with Chagall or the great continental Expressionists - a fact which is slowly and belatedly being recognised by international art historians.
The free, quasi improvisatory brushwork of his very late pictures comes within touching distance of Abstract Expressionism, a movement of which he almost certainly had never heard.
In short, Irish Modernism in art begins with Yeats, and he remains its pre eminent and most original figure.