Jack B Yeats's life was relatively uneventful, with no emotional dramas or spectacular happenings to liven the pen of a biographer. After the death of his wife in 1947, to whom he had been happily married for over fifty years, his work became increasingly reminiscent, bordering on the metaphysical. He painted some metaphorical compositions in which he attempted to cope with his bereavement, as well as some marvellous canvases that are nostalgic for the simple pleasures of the past. Over the final eight years in which he was to paint, until his own death in 1957, he created human images of optimism and resolution and compassion, where real experience and a spiritual force knit together in uplifting, colourful energy.

Returning from the Bathe, Mid-Day is a nostalgic work which dwells on the days of childhood in Sligo, and bathing at Rosses Point. The picture remembers a never-ending summer of blue sea and green sandhills, golden sunlight and breezy air, and the friendly donkey, waiting to greet the dancing children who return waving their wet towels as they run. Yeats once said that in every picture he painted there was a thought of Sligo, and this image encapsulates all he had of happy emotion.

The theme has implications beyond the Watteau-like fantasy. For Yeats at this late state, bathing was akin to baptism, and the child was a symbol of hope and renewal. Even the donkey, like the horse, had otherworldly proportions. The time of day, too, which, like the state of the tide, was a facet of his paintings, is indicative of a possibility for optimism and ultimate serenity. The painting was originally in the collection of the Dublin lawyer, connoisseur and chronicler of James Joyce, Conn Curran, after which it went to America with his daughter Elizabeth Solterer, returning to Ireland, to the Crawford, in 1973.