As a young man, Yeats made his living in London as a cartoonist and journal illustrator for publications such as Paddock Life and Lock to Lock Times, enjoying the sports events he attended. According to a friend, boxing was the only good thing Yeats got out of England. For him it was 'the noble art of self-defence', and his boxers recall that period of his youth, though after his return to Ireland he was to commemorate a great Dublin pugilist, Dan Donnelly, in some pen drawings and in an oil painting of 1936.

The Small Ring, a mid-period oil painted in the loose expressionist manner Yeats perfected during the late twenties, shows a young boxer in a London club at the moment when he has felled his opponent. The excited crowd around him, even the other boxer's second with his towel, are transfixed with astonishment. Everything seems to stop for an instant (except for the racing donkey, one of Yeats's chief delights, in the picture on the wall), as the young man visibly grows in stature, to become a golden haired hero with a spotless body.

Developing beyond his original representational manner to something more expressive and elusive, Yeats also enlarged his work beyond the West of Ireland themes to a subject matter that was universal, showing himself to be far beyond his Irish contemporaries in style and concept. The major issues of life now became his central theme. The young boxer is no longer merely a local boy, but becomes emblematic of mankind's aspirations, translated into a mythology that is applicable to the human race. Yeats still remains a storyteller, describing an incident and the characters involved in it deliciously.

[HP]

Lit. - Pyle, 1992