Jack Yeats was the younger brother of the poet WB Yeats. He surveyed the character and activities of the ordinary people of Western Ireland in his paintings of the early 1920s. Here a man stares over the parapet of the bridge at Sligo into the muddy river. Yeats grew up near Sligo, and knew the people well.

The Yeats brothers were committed nationalists, but were deeply affected by the violence that characterised Ireland's long struggle for freedom from British political control. In this context, Irish history had parallels with that of Scotland, as well as common Celtic or Gaelic heritage.