Born into a family of impoverished Anglo-Irish landholders, his father was the painter John Butler Yeats, and his brother was the poet W. B.

[5] Yeats attended the Chiswick School of Art with his sisters Elizabeth and Susan,[6][7] learning "Freehand drawing in all its branches, practical Geometry and perspective, pottery and tile painting, design for decorative purposes – as in Wall-papers, Furniture, Metalwork, Stained Glass".

"[11] The Marxist art critic and author John Berger also paid tribute to Yeats from a very different perspective, praising the artist as a "great painter" with a "sense of the future, an awareness of the possibility of a world other than the one we know".

He frequently abandoned the brush altogether, applying paint in a variety of different ways, and was deeply interested in the expressive power of colour.

Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the 20th century (and the first to sell for over £1m), he took no pupils and allowed no one to watch him work, so he remains a unique figure.

His literary works include The Careless Flower, The Amaranthers (much admired by Beckett), Ah Well, A Romance in Perpetuity, And To You Also, and The Charmed Life.

At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Yeats' painting The Liffey Swim won a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games.

[16][17] In November 2010, one of Yeats's works, A Horseman Enters a Town at Night, painted in 1948 and previously owned by novelist Graham Greene, sold for nearly £350,000 at a Christie's auction in London.

It presents regular curated exhibitions of his work, notably, The Outside in 2011, Enter the Clowns - The Circus as Metaphor, 2013; The Music has Come, 2014; Painted Universe, 2018; Salt Water Ballads, 2021.