Yeats soldiers on in fickle market for Irish art

AUCTION RESULTS

THE first joint auction of Irish art between the James Adam Salesrooms of Dublin and Bonhams of London last Wednesday realised a total of more than £750,000. According to James O'Halloran of Adam's, "a livelink with Bonhams worked a treat, with a good lot of bidding coming from London."

Following the previous week's Irish art sales by both Christie's and Sotheby's, the market for work from Ireland seems healthier and more buoyant than has been the case since the late 1980s.

Naturally, paintings by Jack B Yeats remain the barometer of Irish art and at the James Adam/Bonhams auction one of his works, The Soldier's Son, dating from 1945, sold for £100,000. Another example of his work, Through the Streets to the Hills, went for £38,000. However, another Yeats canvas called The Fretted Trees, with a pre-sale estimate of £100,000-£120,000, failed to find a buyer. A still life by Roderic O'Conor, which was expected to make £60,000-£80,000, met the same fate. O'Conor's Red Rocks, Brittany. 1898, however went £10,000 above its top estimate of £70,000, thereby demonstrating just how fickle the market remains.

All four of the Paul Henry oils in the sale were sold, the highest price of £35,000 being made by a view of a lakeside village in Connemara. The second painting ever done by Louis Le Brocquy, L'Apre's-Midi d'un Faune, and dating from 1938, fetched £23,000. A summer landscape of Connemara by Patrick Hennessy went for £7,000 and Daniel O'Neill's Awaiting the Lobster Boat made £16,000. Another O'Neill painting, called Spring Evening, failed to find a buyer.

Other prices included: £8,000 for Gerard Dillon's Innismore Lads; £1,900 for a seated nude by Norah McGuinness; £4,400 for William Conor's crayon study of a girl carrying water pails; £3,000 for Percy French's watercolour of Achill Sound; and £25,000 for Boys in a Woodland Stream by Walter Osborne.