'The Imperator' is painted two years after his National Gallery exhibition with William Nicholson and the year after his first solo exhibition with Victor Waddington in Dublin and marks the beginning of Yeats move to more esoteric subject matter and a looser painting style. In this work, Yeats translates a maritime subject into a vivid exploration of weather, light and movement. Description gives way to atmosphere as the animated, broken brushwork energises the surface: the sky is dragged, the sea rendered in restless, shifting passages, and the beach becomes a pale windswept foreground. The descriptive elements continually dissolve and reassert themselves across the canvas.

The title suggests an emblem of modern power and travel and may allude to the celebrated ocean-liner named ‘Imperator’ (later Berengaria). By the 1940s, however, Yeats’ titles function less as literal identifiers than as prompts for memory and feeling. Yeats does not present the vessel as an object of spectacle or dominance; instead its presence suggested rather than asserted.

This work is characteristic of Yeats’ maritime and waterside paintings of the 1940s in public collections, for example Jack B Yeats, ‘Off the Irish Coast’, 1942 (Leeds Museums & Galleries (Art UK).