No.7 Queen Anne’s Gardens: Thomas Matthews Rooke

Location 5

paintings of no.7 Queen Anne's Gardens
No. 7 Queen Anne’s Gardens, picturesque home of painter T. Matthews Rooke — woodcut from Bedford Park Society’s Guide, lower-left, as painted by Henry Marriott Paget, and right, by Rooke himself
Thomas Matthews Rooke
Thomas Matthews Rooke (1842-1942) whose home — where they learned ‘folk dances’ — fascinated the young Yeatses

Painter Thomas Matthews Rooke, at Number 7, Queen Anne’s Gardens, was a friend of Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, and worked with both William Morris and John Ruskin, two artists with significant ideas on the role of art in society.

Rooke is remembered in Yeats’s autobiographies as the painter of a tabarded trumpeter on the original sign on Bedford Park’s Tabard inn. And his home was a source of fascination to Yeats, part of the fairy-tale aspect of Bedford Park: Yeats writes:

The dining-room table, where Sinbad the sailor might have sat, was painted peacock-blue, and the woodwork was all peacock-blue and upstairs there was a window niche so big and high up, there was a flight of steps to go up and down by!

Interestingly, despite their long summers with their mother’s parents in Sligo, the young Yeatses learned their country dancing, not from fairs in the West of Ireland or from watching dancers meet at a country crossroads, but from Rooke’s two sisters in this very house.

Dance would play an important part in Yeats’s poetry and drama: one of his poetry collections was entitled Michael Robartes and the Dancer: And his poem, titled “Among School Children”, ends with the question “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?”

One of his best-loved poems, “The Fiddler of Dooney”, answers some of the questions about the role of art by imagining the satisfaction an artist achieves from making people happy. In this case a fiddle-player, knowing how people love to dance, hopes that when Saint Peter makes his judgements at the Gates of Heaven, a musician might be just as important as, say, his brother and cousin, both priests, who look after the spiritual side of life.

There’s a great image, in the poem, of folk dancing “like a wave of the sea” which suggests that the young Yeats had watched people dance a very well-known Irish dance called The Waves of Tory where two lines of dancers flow and ebb through each other, and then dip and dive like a boat buffeting the waves off Tory Island, to the west of Donegal. The sort of dance that can fill the whole of a long main street in a town like Sligo on Fair Day, when you can’t tell the dancer from the dance!

Hear Ciarán Hinds read the poem ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’:

The Fiddler of Dooney

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.

Fiddler of Dooney: text and drawing of fiddler
Jack Yeats’s image (printed by his sisters) of the fiddler, in his brother’s poem, who sets people dancing
young women folk dancers
‘Folk dance like a wave of the sea’ — the Waves of Tory, a folk dance first recorded by Grace Orpen, cousin of Bedford Park Irish writer Henry Goddard Orpen