Records for Irish art at auction have again been achieved with a rediscovered work by Roderic O'Conor selling for £289,750 sterling.
Called Paysage, Pont-Aven and dating from 1892, the picture was included in an Irish art sale yesterday at Christie's of London where it had been expected to make £150,000£250,000.
The purchaser was a private American collector. Originally owned by an American artist living in Paris but unseen in public for more than a century, Paysage reveals the influence of Van Gogh.
Its inclusion in the Christie's sale greatly heightened interest in this event, where another longlost picture, Played!! by Sir John Lavery, made the day's best price of £575,750.
While this figure is not the highest paid for a work by Lavery, several records for individual Irish artists were achieved. The most notable was the £454,750 made by Thomas Roberts's The Sheet of Water at Carton, Co Kildare.
Commissioned by the first Duke of Leinster (who is shown in the picture with his wife) and painted around 1776, the picture was bought from his descendants by the Hon Desmond Guinness who then sold it at Christie's in 1983 for £62,640; it has now been bought by an Irish collector.
Yesterday's records included another 18th-century artist, Nathaniel Hone; his portrait of Capt the Hon Robert Boyle Walsingham, until recently on loan to the Irish Georgian Society at Castletown, Co Kildare, was sold to an Irish bidder for £245,750.
These prices followed similar sums achieved at Sotheby's in London on Thursday afternoon, when a record for a painting by a living Irish artist was set by Louis Le Brocquy's Traveller Woman with Newspaper. It made £1,158,500 sterling.
As at Christie's, this sale featured a rediscovered Lavery, A Woman and her Dog, Grez-sur-Loing, which almost doubled its pre-sale estimate to go for £993,500.
The three additional records at Sotheby's were for Harry Kernoff's Davy Byrne's, Duke Street from the Bailey (£80,500), Woman and Child Feeding Chickens by Frank McKelvey (£78,300) and James Humbert Craig's Leenane, Co Galway (£37,300).