In the third episode from the series of podcasts, ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ from The Model, home of the Niland Collection, a painting by Jack B. Yeats in the Niland Collection, ‘Communicating with Prisoners’ (c.1924) is contextualised against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War. 

The oil painting is a transitional work from the artist’s career and portrays seven women as they attempt to communicate with female prisoners imprisoned inside the high bastion tower of Kilmainham Gaol. In 1923, Kilmainham Gaol was entirely occupied by female political prisoners and these women were Anti-Treaty Republicans, imprisoned here by the Free State Government during the Civil War period (1922-1923). Some of the women in the painting can be identified from contemporary photographs of the time. The second woman from the right in Jack’s painting resembles the republican activist and writer, Dorothy Macardle (1889 -1958).