A DUBLIN art dealer paid £104,000 for Paul Henry's The Potato Harvest at the James Adam's sale on Wednesday, setting a new record for the artist's work. It took under two minutes to sell the picture, which is considered to be one of the artist's finest. According to James O'Halloran, who conducted the auction, there were at least seven people in the room who had come to buy the picture but such was the speed of bidding between the buyer and underbidder, no one else had a chance.
The price underpins the new strength of the Irish art market, a market that has been less than exciting since the boom year of 1990. It was in 1990 that the previous record for a Paul Henry painting was set, again at James Adam, when The Fairy Thorn sold for £70,000.
Other prices from Wednesday's sale were steady if not spectacular. The big Jack Yeats work of the sale, Through the Streets to the Hills, was withdrawn without reaching its lower estimate of £35,000. Another Henry painting, Village by the Lake, made £25,000; James Arthur O'Connor's An Irish Glen sold for £15,000, A View of Brittany by Walter Osborne fetched £11,500, George Russel's Girls Playing in a Forest made £9,500, Frank McKelvey's The Green Caravan sold for £8,000, Roderic O'Connor's Reclining Nude fetched £7,000 and James Le Jeune's Strolling in the Park was knocked down at £5,600.
