SNIPPET: Dublin-born William Butler YEATS (1868-1939), the celebrated poet and author, winner of the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature, was only one member of the talented YEATS family who had roots in Cos. Dublin and Sligo and London. William's daughter, Anne (b. 1919), is a contemporary artist and early member of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, who was still living and working in Dublin in 1999. In 1996, she generously presented the Jack B. Yeats Archive to the National Gallery of Ireland, which included her uncle's sketchbooks and library, papers and working records taken from his studio - all extraordinary treasures. William Butler YEATS' talented father, John Butler ("J.B.Y") YEATS (1839-1922), started as a pen-and-ink draughtsman, covering pages with tiny, exquisite drawings of characters he saw or from his imagination. He turned them to charcoal and gouache, and finally to oil, and past the age of 50, he modernized his method and created some of the most wonderful portrait images in Irish art, haunting likenesses of the leading figures in the cultural Ireland of his day. His wife was Susan Mary POLLEXFEN, one of a mercantile family from Sligo. John spent much of his time as portrait painter and illustrator in Dublin and London; between 1909 and 1922 he lived in New York where he devoted much of his life to writing and defining his ultimate self-portrait. Two of their children died young - Robert ("Bobbie") Corbet YEATS (1870-1873), and Jane Grace YEATS (1875-1876). William's sisters Susan Mary "Lily" YEATS (1866-1949) and Elizabeth "Lolly" Corbet YEATS (1868-1940) were co-founders of printing presses, the Dun Emer Industries and Cuala Industries in Dublin. Lily, an original decorative fabric artist, trained under the renowned socialist-poet and artist William MORRIS. She also made embroidered pictures, some designed by her sister. Elizabeth as a printer and designer, in addition to being a significant watercolorist. She also wrote and published four brushwork manuals, and taught art to budding young students. One of her most famous pupils was Irish artist Mainie JELLET.. William's brother, John ("Jack") Butler YEATS (1871-1957), was a prolific artist who once said that he never painted a picture with "a thought of Sligo" in it, where he spent many happy summers with his maternal grandparents. The first decade of Jack's career after boyhood in Sligo was spent as a successful black-and-white illustrator and creator of cartoons, working as a visual journalist in the days before cameras were widely used. He loved sports, as can be seen in the most popular of his paintings, "The Liffey Swim." He and his family never forgot the visits with his POLLEXFEN relatives to Hazelwood Racecourse in Sligo: "The crowds, the smell of bruised grass, the thud of the horses over the jumps," one of his sisters dreamily described it. Jack is described as a quiet, modest man, very gentle and particularly likeable, in comparison with his more renowned and lofty poet brother. Jack said that the painter captures a particular moment, in a particular place, at a partic! ular time. Early on he dedicated himself to watercolor, painting into maturity his chosen subject - Irish life - and maintaining a tremendous energy in his work. Before that he had spent the 1890s in London, where he married an artist, Mary Cottenham WHITE, in 1894. The couple had no children. Jack continued making cartoons throughout his life, signing them with the pseudonym "W. Bird." He also continued to illustrate for such diverse authors as his brother, and John Millington SYNGE, Patricia LYNCH, and Seamus O'KELLY - always getting to the core of each writer's message with memorable imagery. A coveted artist, Jack's painting, "Oh Had I the Wings of a Swallow," most recently sold for 800,000 pounds, and in March of 1999 a museum was dedicated in his honor in Dublin. -- Excerpts, "World of Hibernia" magazine, and "The Yeats Reader."