The Irish were out in force for the sales of Irish art by Christie's and Sotheby's in London yesterday and on Thursday, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic, in London.
Good prices for Orpen and a record price for Sean Keating suggested that if the quality was there, so was the money.
But the real test yesterday was at Sotheby's, and there was a tangible air of anticipation in the main gallery on Bond St at 2 p.m. as the sale began. Most bidders there were Irish, and most of those bidding by phone, via a bank of lines attended by Sotheby's staff, were Irish as well.
The focus of attention was incontrovertibly on one of 10 paintings on auction from the Jefferson Smurfit Group collection, Sir William Orpen's splendid portrait of Mrs St George, but there were other highlights in the sale.
As lots were briskly knocked down at respectable but but generally modest prices, the first picture to set pulses racing was a small, Romantic portrait by Sir John Lavery. It almost doubled its pre-auction estimate. Fairly soon afterwards another Lavery portrait more than doubled its upper estimate of £20,000, selling for £55,000 (€77,000). Works by Irish post-Impressionist Roderic O'Conor also exceeded their estimates. All of which probably soothed any ruffled nerves in Sotheby's and provided an encouraging preamble to the pièce de résistance.
Bidding for Mrs St George was fast and furious and generated tremendous tension. She was finally sold to a worried-looking man in a grey suit who took directions from his client via a mobile phone with an earpiece, all the while stalking up and down the aisle, scanning the room to see who was bidding against him. A well-known Bond St picture dealer, he has been known to buy on behalf of clients of whom some have Irish connections.
He clinched Mrs St George at £820,000 (€1.15 million), not too dramatically above the upper estimate of £700,000 for such a high-profile picture, and murmured "congratulations" to the person at the other end of the line.
The room visibly relaxed and people chatted among themselves, only to be presented with another Orpen, a fine small portrait of a woman, not among the Smurfit pictures.
It more than doubled what does seem, it must be said, to have been an excessively conservative estimate, zooming up to £200,000 (€280,000).
Yeats was quite another story, but then there were no top-notch Yeats works for sale. The two from the Smurfit collection achieved the lower end of their by no means modest estimates. Another, a good picture from a Canadian collection that provided some excellent lots for the sale, failed to sell.
There were good results for works by Paul Henry and Louis le Brocquy. A fine view of Clifden in Connemara by the Irish painter George Campbell, who died in 1974, created a stir when it achieved £42,000 (€59,000) on an upper estimate of £20,000.
Once in the possession of film director John Huston, it was one of two outstanding paintings by Campbell in the sale.
Many lots struggled to reach the lower end of their estimates. But there was a feeling of solidity to the sale all the same. As Suzanne MacDougal of the Solomon Gallery remarked: "Good paintings got good prices."
Buyers of Irish paintings know their market well and don't generally throw money around, although several lots, including a fine Harry Kernoff streetscape, were pursued by fiercely competitive buyers who didn't balk at paying the price.
Despite the London location, the sale underlined the fact that the Irish art market is specialised and relatively localised, as evidenced by the close, careful bidding for good paintings by such artists as Nano Reid, Tony O'Malley and Patrick Collins.
Ms Joanne Doidge-Harrison, of Sotheby's modern British and Irish art department, said she was more than happy with the event. She said the sale had been a vindication of the sellers' agreement to set realistic estimates.