When Sotheby's shows a selection of paintings in Dublin from the company's Irish sale, one work will be particularly worth studying. Painted by Sir John Lavery, this is an oil called Study for The Tennis Party and shows an abundance of affinities with another picture by the same artist sold by rival auctioneer Christie's last May. Played!, dating from the same year, 1885, and on the same theme as Study for The Tennis Party, had been expected to make £100,000£150,000 sterling but in the event sold for £575,750. The estimate carried by the work to be sold by Sotheby's is £250,000-£350,000. Although a study for another painting, it is larger than Played!
The Tennis Party, first shown in London's Royal Academy in 1886 and now in the collection of the Aberdeen Art Gallery, is the most celebrated of a number of works painted by Lavery over the one summer and all showing the same game being played.
The artist had recently returned to Scotland after spending time at Grez-sur-Loing - its surrounding landscape another frequent subject of his work during this period - and wished to make an impression through the depiction of figures in movement. Since lawn tennis was an extremely popular but newly-invented sport, barely 10 years old when Lavery produced this work, it offered him the ideal theme.
The painting about to be sold by Sotheby's differs from the finished work in a number of respects, with the positions of a couple of players reversed and two other figures added. It would appear that, in keeping with the plein air principles of impressionism, the Study was painted on the spot while Lavery watched a tennis match in progress. The picture was last sold by Sotheby's for £27,000 in November 1983 and has since been owned by an Australian collector in Sydney.
Another Lavery picture in the same sale is slightly earlier in execution and dates from the artist's time in Grez-surLoing. Expected to make £300,000-£400,000, The Return from Market is an intensely lyrical work, quite different in spirit to the Study for The Tennis Party, its elegiac quality apparent in the two figures gliding through lily-filled waters in a punt. Moving to a much later period and work of quite different character, the Sotheby's sale is set to include a considerable group of pictures by Louis Le Brocquy. Last May, the same auction house set a new record for this artist at auction when it secured £1.15 million for his early Travelling Woman with Newspaper.
The estimate of £200,000-£300,000 that Sotheby's has given for Le Brocquy's Sick Tinker Child might therefore seem rather conservative and it could well do better than this in the sale. Dating, like the other painting, from the second half of the 1940s, this one was described by James White in the 1950s as depicting a man "bearing away the child, while the woman, fearful but helpless, watches him go . . . the attitude is expressive of terror before a half-comprehended tragedy". A second picture from the same period, Travellers Making Twig Sign, carries the pre-sale estimate of £70,000-£100,000 and Sotheby's will also feature some later Le Brocquy oils and watercolours. Some of these will be on show at Sotheby's Dublin rooms on Molesworth Street in the week from Tuesday April 24th.
