William Butler Yeats’s ambivalent relationship to aestheticism has rarely been discussed in relation to the views and actions of his father, the painter John Butler Yeats, who had a similarly conflicted relationship to the movement. This article traces the influence of the father’s thinking on the son via an examination of their correspondence and conversations, as well as an examination of the ethos of Bedford Park, the area where the Yeats’s lived in London during and after the poets’ formative years.