Stellar year for Yeats and Chinese pottery

It was a year of many auction highlights and heart-warming stories

1 Painting of the year: A Fair Day, Mayoby Jack B Yeats sold at Adam's on September 28th for €1 million – the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art in Ireland. The painting, dated 1925, once hung on loan in former taoiseach Éamon de Valera's office, and was originally sold for £250. Adam's described the result as "a great confidence boost for the Irish art market".

2 Auction of the year:a marathon seven-hour sale at Christie's, London on July 14th where collectors from around the world spent £3.4 million (€3.8 million) buying art and antiques from the estate of the late Dr Tony Ryan, founder of Ryanair.

3 Antique of the year:a Chinese Ming Dynasty porcelain dish – valued for probate in Co Derry in 1985 for £1,000 – sold for €310,000 at Adam's country house auction at Slane Castle in Co Meath on October 11th.

4 Portrait of the year:a painting of a four-year-old girl, sent from Germany to be sold at Whyte's, turned out to be Portrait of Liv Hempel– daughter of Eduard Hempel, Germany's envoy to Ireland during the second World War.

The ensuing publicity resulted in Liv Hempel (75), now living in New York, being reunited with her former governess Elisabeth Sweeney, née Baroness von Offenberg (96), now living in Achill, Co Mayo. Neither woman knew the other was still alive. They met privately during the summer, for the first time since 1945, when Ms Hempel travelled to Ireland. The portrait, by Irish artist Patrick Hennessy, sold at auction for €4,800 on March 14th.

5 Collection of the year:Nama seized 16 paintings from property investor Derek Quinlan. Two of the paintings were acquired by the National Gallery of Ireland. Christie's offered the other 14 at auctions in New York and London and sold nine for about €2 million.

6 Find of the year:five watercolour images of horse-racing by Jack B Yeats, found hidden behind a Victorian print in a rotten frame which was about to be thrown on a skip during a house clearance in the south of England, sold at Christie's for £22,500 (€25,493).

7 Collectible of the year:a letter, written in pencil on a single sheet of paper by Michael Collins from Stafford Jail in England where he had been sent after the 1916 Rising, made €16,000 at a sale of Irish historical items hosted by Adam's and Mealy's. The letter, dated May 16th, 1916, was sent to his sister, Johanna, "c/o The Chief Postal Censor, London".

8 Bargain of the year:at a Mealy's auction of rare books, a 240-page cloth-bound volume titled The Development of the Prepositional Pronouns from A.D. 800 to A.D. 1500sold for just €10. The venerable tome was a dissertation for the degree of master of arts in celtic studies at UCD in 1950 by Fr Ray Finbarr Kennedy.

9 Headline of the year:"Down and out" Earl of Cardigan "must sell silverware or go hungry" – Daily Telegraph(August 20th). The story revealed an aristocrat was "to all intents and purposes down and out" and needs to raise money or "go hungry, a high court judge has heard". A few days later, the earl contacted the paper to distance himself from his barrister's comments and insisted he was by no means "down and out". He was "merely down to my last stately home".

10 Villain – or heroine – of the year:a cleaning woman allegedly ruined a piece of modern sculpture (valued at over $1 million) by scouring a rubber trough – part of an installation titled Wenn's anfaengt durch die Decke zu tropfen (When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling)by the late Martin Kippenberger. The "dirt" was actually paintwork on the trough meant to represent a dried-out puddle. Curators at Dortmund's Ostwall gallery – and insurance suits – were not amused.