A fascinating collection of oils and watercolours painted by one of the less well-known figures associated with the Irish literary renaissance comes up for sale early next month when Mealy's auctions the contents of Loughananna House near Mitchelstown, Co Cork.
The property was home to Catherine Kennedy until her death last March; born in 1913, Mrs Kennedy was the youngest child of Robert Gregory who, in turn, was the only child of Sir William Gregory and his wife Augusta. Sir William died when his son was still very young; Robert was raised by his mother at Coole Park in Co Galway, and sent to school in England. Lady Gregory's diaries reveal the high hopes she entertained for her offspring and the disappointment she experienced when these seemed unlikely to be realised. In his final years at Harrow, Robert's academic performance deteriorated and he failed to follow the example of both his father and grandfather in becoming head boy.
He also failed his exams at Oxford and Lady Gregory had begun to despair when Robert announced his intention to become an artist. "I am glad he has so strong a bent towards anything and especially so high a profession," she wrote.
In 1903, Robert Gregory entered London's Slade School of Art and subsequently went to Paris to study with the fashionable French artist Jacques-Emile Blanche, who knew his cousin Hugh Lane. Even while still at the Slade, he began to design sets and costumes for plays at the Abbey Theatre, not least his mother's Kincora, which was staged in 1905.
He also painted the wood scene for Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows in 1910 and one of the pictures being sold by Mealy's, lot 488, is an oil in its original frame representing a scene from the same play; this carries an estimate of £2,000-£3,000. Sean O'Casey was to call him "a fine and sensitive designer for the theatre". Robert Gregory was as enthusiastic a sportsman as an artist, and this may have impeded his progress in the latter field; cricket was his particular passion and he played the game for Ireland in 1912.
The same year, he held his first one-man show at London's Baillie Gallery; a second exhibition followed in 1914 when The Studio's critic referred to his "sense of atmosphere" as a gift "which no imaginative interpreter of Irish landscape could be without, but it is rare indeed that it finds expression side by side with so conscious a concern with pattern as Mr Gregory exhibits".
All but one of the seven lots featured at Mealy's are landscapes; the exception, lot 505, is a set of four watercolours showing Staffordshire figurines from Lady Gregory's own collection, painted for her Kiltartan Poetry Book, published in 1909 (£600-£900). The landscape oils are notable primarily for their undemanding charm and for Gregory's habit of showing a sequence of undulating hills which recede towards a cloudfilled sky. Lot 499, Burrin, is especially interesting because included with it is the artist's working sketch in which he has divided the view into a series of squares (£3,000-£4,000).
Gregory was obviously a methodical and orderly worker, not especially imaginative or adventurous, but, as his mother observed in her diary, with a great love of the country.
Tragically, he died in January 1918 shortly before the end of the First World War when an Italian gunner shot down the plane he was flying. It is as much for Robert Gregory's family associations as for the works' own merits that these pictures are of interest.
The Loughananna House sale conducted by Mealy's takes place on Wednesday and Thursday, June 7th and 8th next.
