Until now the quiet, Queen-Anne-retro, Arts-&-Crafts-style conservation-area and architectural-history gem that is Bedford Park, where Yeats was raised, hasn’t considered celebrating the Irish poet whose genius it fostered. (Enwrought Light’s stone base, set between the roadway and the pavement grey of Yeats’s best-known poem, will be engraved with the words that inspired Conrad Shawcross’s uplifting artwork. The plaque idea was panned, however, with one Bedford Park resident pointing out that “the old chap”, John Butler Yeats, a much-loved conversationalist but not entirely successful portrait painter, “was always behind with his rent”. So what has changed to make local residents campaign for an artwork to celebrate Yeats in Bedford Park? Quite a dramatic change from a London conservation area that once viewed a family of world-renowned Irish artists as irrelevant to its place in history!

Source: The Irish Times May 10, 2021 04:30 UTC