One of two Jack B. Yeats paintings sold in a Canadian auction will be returning to Ireland. The two paintings netted nearly €244,000 on Thursday night at the Heffel Fine Art Auction in Toronto. The Yeats paintings were among 10 Irish works sold.
The Mail Car, Early Morning was sold to an Irish buyer and netted the highest price of the night, CAN$227,500 (€146,046). The oil painting depicts Yeats's memory of a trip to Ballina, Co Mayo in 1905 and shows a horse-drawn mail carriage on a main street at dawn. The Heffel firm could not disclose the name of the Irish buyer.
The second Yeats painting, The Boat Builder, is based on his illustration of an article J.M. Synge wrote on Galway boat builders for the Manchester Guardian in 1905. The Boat Builder was purchased by a US bidder for CAN$161,750 (€103,830).
Both oil paintings had been largely forgotten and were stored in a Canadian barn for years following the 1951 death of the University of Toronto Dean of Arts, Alfred Tennyson DeLury, who purchased the paintings in the late 1920s. "We're delighted with the sales in the Irish section, and the Yeats in particular," said Mr David Heffel, who along with his brother Robert, has held the art auction for 15 years.
Among the other Irish works in the auction were Colin W. Middleton's Oies Blaches, which sold for CAN$54,625 (€35,061) and Louis Le Brocquy's Towards an Image of Samuel Beckett, which went for CAN$48,625 (€31,210).