Just as it seemed the Irish art sales season had drawn to a close, Phillips has announced that a selection of pictures from this country will be included in a sale in London next month. There are 19 works in the group which features some very impressive and familiar names such as Jack Yeats - a relatively late work called What Will It Be? showing the interior of a bar and carrying an estimate of £250,000-£350,000 sterling - and Louis Le Brocquy, who is represented by a wash and coloured crayon portrait plus two watercolour studies of Malaga (£2,000-£3,000 for the single lot).
However, more surprising is the inclusion of a small oil, Woman with a Peacock Feather Fan, measuring just nine by seven inches and painted by Sarah Purser whose work comes up all too infrequently at auction. This is all the more extraordinary because Purser had a long and productive life; she was aged 95 at the time of her death in 1943. Instances of the artist's work only come up at auction once or twice annually. Last year, for example, Whyte's sold a watercolour Portrait of a Lady for £580 while De Vere's got £2,400 for a pastel portrait of the Abbey Theatre actress Helen Laird. The highest price a Purser work has made at public sale is £31,000, paid at another De Vere's auction in 1998 for Sitting in the Garden (Portrait Painted in the Open Air).
Sarah Purser was the subject of a fine monograph on her life and work written by John O'Grady and published in 1996. Nonetheless, she is still too little known or appreciated not just as an excellent artist but also as an indefatigable supporter of cultural causes in Ireland. In both style and content, the picture being sold by Phillips is characteristic of the "little figure subjects" in oils with which Purser enjoyed her first success at Dublin exhibitions in the 1880s, following her return to the city after time spent studying in Paris.
The back of the panel on which the oil has been painted carries Purser's initials and the date 1888 but in any case, the style of the sitter's clothes, the high-backed chair, the oriental carpet and the presence of a peacock feather fan would all indicate that the picture dates from the late 19th century at the height of the "aesthetic" craze on this island and our nearest neighbour.
Later, Purser would tend to become more academic in her approach to portraits, since so many of them were undertaken as commissions; her time would also be much taken up with work for various organisations such as the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, which she founded in 1924 primarily to campaign for the return of the Lane pictures to Dublin. But at the time this little gem was painted, Purser was still a young woman at the onset of her professional career and her character is revealed in the work's freshness and charm. It carries a pre-sale estimate of £10,000-£15,000.
Other pictures in the same auction, while unquestionably fine, are perhaps of less interest. There is, for example, a particularly good example of Frank McKelvey's art in Donegal Farmyard, which is expected to go for £15,000-£20,000 and two of James Humbert Craig's landscapes, Coastal Picnic and Glenveagh Hills, Co Donegal which both have the same estimate of £3,000-£5,000.
All these paintings are included in an auction of 20th century British and Irish art at Phillips on New Bond Street on Tuesday, July 17th.
