Old-fashioned charm of works out of the west

Among the list of familiar names to be found in next Wednesday's auction of Irish art at the James Adam salerooms - Yeats, McGuinness, Henry, French, O'Conor and Lavery - is also that of Frank Egginton.

Represented on this occasion by no less than four pictures, Egginton's work turns up for sale with great regularity, but he has rarely garnered much attention. In published histories of Irish art this century, for example, he usually remains unmentioned, even though during his lifetime, and since his death in April 1990, he has remained consistently popular with collectors.

Egginton's pictures can be depended upon to fetch good, but not spectacular, prices. A watercolour of Maumeem Lough, Connemara, for example, was one of two works by this artist which sold for sterling £2,530 at Sotheby's in May, 1997. The following May, his Horse and Cart outside a Thatched Cottage made £4,000 at Adam's, where last December another Egginton watercolour, A Bend in the River, sold for £4,200.

Watercolours were always his preferred medium - not surprisingly, his father had been a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours - but from the age of 50 onwards he did occasionally work in oils. Generally, the results demonstrate his want of familiarity and expertise; accordingly, prices achieved by Egginton oils are low, such as the £1,400 paid for his Mountain Stream, Kylemore, Connemara at Adam's in September 1996.

Despite being considered an Irish artist, Frank Egginton was born in England in November 1908. His childhood and youth were spent in Devon, and it was only in 1930 that he first visited Co Donegal, which was to become one of his favourite sources of inspiration. According to Theo Snoddy in his Dictionary of 20th century Irish Artists, Egginton gradually came to spend more and more time in Ireland, working in a Belfast factory during the second World War before moving with his wife to Cookstown, Co Tyrone, in 1946. He first exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1932 and also showed with the Fine Art Society in London and at venues in Belfast. Egginton was a highly conservative artist and this accounts for both his popularity with the buying public and his want of critical attention. His style seems to have changed very little over the years. Donegal, Sligo, Mayo and Connemara were persistent favourites with Egginton, and his landscapes and coastal scenes of these regions have an old-fashioned quality in which the present century seems to have barely intruded.

Indeed, at times, his watercolours look as though they could have been painted 100 earlier, and they tend to have titles such as Bringing Home the Turf and Country Roads. The low, grey skies and open, mildly undulating landscape of the west of Ireland obviously provided enduring appeal for Egginton. His watercolour technique is highly proficient and he is especially good at representing movement of clouds and light reflected on water.

Because of the essentially anachronistic nature of his work, Frank Egginton will never be considered an artist of the first calibre but he is sure to retain his appeal for buyers thanks to an unassuming but genuine charm.

The Irish art sale at the James Adam Salerooms takes place on Wednesday at 2.15 p.m.