Yeats began to focus on oil painting around 1910, and from the mid-1920s onward his compositions became more gestural in style and less narrative in subject. The Scratch Mare demonstrates this new approach, capturing the excitement and speed of horse racing—a motif in his earlier graphic works—in fluid, blurred impasto.

from Snay, The Donald and Marilyn Keough Collection of Irish Art (Notre Dame, 2019)