John Butler Yeats

Inscribed in brown ink l.r.: Mrs Paget, pencil on laid paper, recto, with a portrait of a gentleman verso

18 x 12.7 cm; 7 x 5 inches

Provenance: By descent in the artist’s family until 2017

Henrietta (Etta) Paget, née Farr, was a painter, the daughter of statistician, William Farr. The Pagets, a family of artists and illustrators, were neighbours of the Yeats family in Bedford Park in west London in the 1890s.

Etta studied at the Heatherley School of Fine Art where she met Henry Marriott Paget, RBA, (1857–1936). They married in 1879 and were leading members of the Bedford Park circle of writers and artists. The house in The Orchard had a north facing studio which Etta and Henry both used before their children were born. Bedford Park was known for its free thinkers and ‘New Women’ who participated in discussions ranging from politics to art and literature with men on an equal basis. The couple had four children over eleven years, one of whom, Dorothy, became an actress. Etta’s artistic practice dwindled in the face of family life. Etta, Henry and her sister Florence, the actress, were members of the Golden Dawn, a group involved with spiritualism and the occult. W. B. Yeats was also a member and Florence was said to have had an affair with him and George Bernard Shaw.

Henry Paget was a painter of historical subjects and portraits and his portrait of W.B. Yeats is in the Ulster Museum. His paintings, especially his historical scenes, were illustrative rather than inspiring and he also painted mythological subjects. Paget worked as an illustrator for the Sphere in Constantinople during the Balkan War of 1912-13.