Jack Butler Yeats was born in London and grew up in Sligo. He is the brother of the poet William Butler Yeats. Yeats worked as an illustrator before experimenting with oil painting in 1897. From 1905 he used the medium regularly, working in an impressionist style early on. Yeats's main subjects were Celtic mythology, scenes of everyday Irish life and horseracing. A prolific artist, he worked from the age of seventeen until his death, producing over a thousand paintings and drawings as well as several plays, novels and volumes of poetry.