More than £1 million was paid yesterday for a painting by Jack Butler Yeats, setting a record for the sale of a picture by an Irish artist. An unnamed Irish collector paid £881,500 sterling for Singing `Oh, Had I the Wings of a Swallow' according to a spokeswoman at the London auction house, Sotheby's.
The painting was sold at a major exhibition of Irish furniture, ceramics, silver and art. The Irish Sale, which has been held annually for the past four years, attracts art lovers from around the world and many Irish collectors keen to see the items return to Ireland.
Mr Mark Adams, a specialist in Irish painting at Sotheby's, explained why Singing was sold for such a high price: "I believe it is the greatest Yeats seen at auction in recent years. He painted Ireland in a straightforward style and then in 1925, almost overnight, he became an expressionist. It is an extraordinary transitional painting."
The Yeats painting is one of the earliest major works undertaken by him and combines several of the themes to which Yeats would re turn again and again - song and trains. The picture shows a young woman standing in a train carriage on a journey through Co Kildare. She is singing to her fellow passengers while they sit in their seats with their heads lowered.
It was painted in 1925, when Yeats was 54. In 1955, shortly before his death, he wrote to the then owner of the painting describing his inspiration for the picture, that the woman would sing during the journey and then look for money from the other passengers.
"She would sing standing up in the carriage, getting I think a kind of rolling-sounding loud effect from the roof, collect what she could in a shell and at the first stop of the train at a station move swiftly to another compartment."
Twenty-three Yeats paintings were put up for sale, but Singing proved to be the biggest draw. The previous record price for a painting by an Irish artist, also a Jack Yeats - A farewell to Mayo - was sold in 1996 for u£804,500 sterling.
One of the more curious acquisitions was a pair of fossilised prehistoric Irish elk horns, which were bought for a snip at £20,700 sterling.