Less-known artists coming into the picture

Last week, this column looked at how Irish furniture performed at auction during the spring season and noted a continuing - and largely unappeased - appetite for good quality items.

The same demand was also apparent for Irish art, but at least the requirements of buyers could be more easily met since names who formerly might not have excited too much attention have now risen in the estimation of the market.

As new collectors enter the field, they cannot hope to pay the sums now expected for such well-established names as Yeats, Lavery and O'Conor and, therefore, choose to buy hitherto less-fashionable artists, thereby driving up their prices.

One of the clearest indicators of this trend has been the rapid rise in favour of Harry Kernoff, an artist whose work until very recently could only expect to realise quite modest sums at public auction. In mid-May, Kernoff's In Davy's Parlour Sung: Self-Portrait with Davy Byrne and Martin Murphy came up for sale at Sotheby's. While admittedly an admirable example of this painter's style, nonetheless there was some surprise when the picture effectively doubled its pre-sale estimate of £60,000 to make £119,000 sterling.

A year earlier, the same auction house had set the previous record price for a Kernoff when it sold his View of Davy Byrne's from Duke Street for £80,500. It now seems highly probable that prices achieved by this artist will continue to climb.

The Sotheby's sale saw a number of other new records set for Irish art, including the highest sum yet paid for any picture from this country, £1,983,500 sterling, for Sir William Orpen's Portrait of Gardenia with Riding Crop. This surpassed the previous figure of more than £1,300,000 paid in December 1998 for Sir John Lavery's The Bridge at Grez.

Orpen's picture is imbued with a considerable poignancy as the sitter was the daughter of his mistress, Evelyn St George, who gave birth to another child by the artist in the same year as this work was painted.

Orpen, of course, has never fallen much out of favour and while the sum paid for the portrait of Gardenia St George was something of a stir, it was not altogether unexpected.

Also at Sotheby's, there were new records achieved for Andrew Nicholl, whose View of Howth, Co Dublin through a Poppy Field made £25,800, and for the 18th century artist Stephen Slaughter, whose exceptionally fine portrait of William Fitzmaurice, second Earl and 21st Baron of Kerry, went for £75,000.

The day before this particular sale, Christie's also offered a large collection of Irish art with a number of lots making new records for the artists responsible. Norah McGuinness's Bird on the Mountain, for example, sold for £28,200, and £80,750 was paid for Nathaniel Hone's Boating on the River, a work which had been expected to go for no more than £15,000.

The real shock of the Christie's sale, however, were the sums paid for a group of some 50 pictures which had come from the studio of the late Derek Hill. Although consistently popular, Hill, who died a year ago this month, had never commanded enormous prices but on this occasion his view of Prof R.B. McDowell walking in the grounds of Trinity College Dublin, a delightfully atmospheric piece in which there was widespread interest, went way past its top pre-sale estimate of £3,000 to make £23,500.

Many other Hill studio items performed equally well. Even if no sales in Ireland this spring could produce equivalent new records, they almost all indicated demand among collectors for good examples of this country's art.