DUBLIN.- Whyte’s auction of Irish & International Art promises to deliver another exciting opportunity for collectors to acquire rare artworks of outstanding quality and enduring value. On Monday 28 September 2026 the auction has 156 lots of Important art valued at €1.7 million.
Mainie Jellett’s masterpiece Nude by the Sea (lot 43, €90,000-€120,000) features on the cover of the auction catalogue. It is part of the small body of work Jellett made from 1939-1943 that is rightly seen as the consolidation of many of the ideas she had grappled with throughout the previous two decades. Landscapes and 'nude studies' would appear regularly in Jellett's various solo shows and in her submissions to group exhibitions throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. As an image of potent sensuality, it offers a striking rebuff to the various religious and nationalist tropes of femininity that dominated Irish visual culture by the early 1940s. Compositionally closest to The Land ire (sold through Whyte’s for €110,000, 2019), Nude by the Sea might be read as a companion piece, but one that registers something of Jellett's resistance to women's increasingly subordinate position within the new Irish state.
An earlier example from the artist, La Pieta (lot 44, €20,000-€30,000) dates to 1928, a significant year for Mainie Jellett, when she was included among nine Irish artists to represent Ireland at the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam. Just five years previous Jellett's work had been condemned by the critics in Dublin when she exhibited her Modernist paintings - among them Decoration, 1923 - to overwhelmingly negative reaction with the Irish Times describing the national treasure as a 'freak' picture and comparing it to an image of 'a malformed onion'. In her essay, Mainie Jellett: Translating Cubism, Dr Riann Coulter argued that following the hostility she encountered in 1923 the artist realised that in order convert Ireland to the Modernist cause she would have to communicate with her audience in a different way. La Piet exhibits three elements - Cubist, religious and Celtic - that helped ingratiate her work to Irish audiences.
Jack Yeats’ Crossing the City, 1929 (lot 29, €120,000-€180,000) shows an unusual view of Dublin's city centre looking south diagonally from O'Connell Bridge down D'Olier Street with a view of the grey edifices of Trinity College on the horizon. During the late 1920s Yeats' style was developing dramatically and moving from his more realist early work to the fragmented avant-garde methods of his later painting. This work provides a rare example of expressionism in Irish art in its strong individual application of form and colour to a contemporary subject - the city. It was exhibited in London rather than Dublin when first painted. Its first owner was the author of the controversial Trials of Burma, (1937), Maurice Collis who through his long sojourn in India may well have recognised within it the tension between the traditional and local and a delight in the pleasures and spectacle of metropolitan life. Against the Stream, (lot 34, €100,000-€150,000) is a later work dating to 1945. Rivers and ferrymen are a major theme in Yeats' work. The ferryman, like the pilot man who guided the ships in and out of port is symbolic of an innate wisdom and a keen understanding of the complexities of the sea and the tide. The title of this work indicates the skill of the man as he manoeuvres the boat upstream. The disconcerting discrepancy in scale between the giant male figure and the tiny doll-like forms of the passengers equally evokes a world of make-believe.
Paul Henry’s Connemara Landscape (lot 22, €150,000-€200,000) is probably based on sketches done while the artist was touring the West in the 1930s. The lightness of the palette - a reflection of his improved financial and domestic situation - as well as the handling of the paint in the sky and foreground also suggests an execution date around this period. The work displays all the hallmarks of the Belfast born artist: a west of Ireland subject, thatched cottages, turf stacks and dominant cumulous clouds.
At a slightly more modest guide, West of Ireland Road Through The Bog, c.1932-1935 [Lot 25, €100,000-€150,000,] shows a quiet road, the only movement evident coming from the central character in the picture: the natural world. The light cirrus clouds add a softness to the scene, while their reflection in the bog pool in the foreground add depth to the composition. Both are quintessential impressions of the western idyll, whose impact continues to be felt to this day and should attract competitive bidding in the final auction of the season.
The fact that Roderic O’Conor’s The Orchard, 1934-35 (lot 18, €60,000-€80,000) was one of twenty-three by the artist included in his joint exhibition with Matthew Smith in London in April 1956 was a tribute to its quality, given that the show was a first for the artist and marked the beginning of his rediscovery. O'Conor had found new inspiration when he and his young wife stayed at Torremolinos in Spain during 1934-35. At this location, working outdoors in oils on board, he executed at least a handful of landscapes - sun-filled paintings that recaptured his old verve and confidence. The present example, quite possibly featuring gnarled olive rather than fruit trees, would have been painted close to where the same-size picture titled simply Torremolinos was executed. Since 2018, the latter work has belonged to the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame near South Bend, Indiana, as part of a gift featuring works by other Irish artists including Walter Osborne, Jack Yeats and Mary Swanzy.
Portrait of Sydney R. Cardew (lot 20, €8,000-€12,000) by Sen Keating was purchased from the artist by the sitter's cousins, the Jameson family of whiskey fame, and lent to the RHA exhibition in 1918. It has not been seen in public since. For Keating, elected an Associate for the RHA in 1918, Cardew's features and fascinating uniform offered an opportunity to publicly display his skills as a painter of finely detailed portraits, a talent that would provide necessary income throughout his career. The painting was exhibited in the RHA in 1918 along with several other examples of Keating's portraits, including Thinking Out Gobnait, a portrait of Harry Clarke (sold at Whyte’s for €58,000, May 2021).
Long Black Train (lot 67, €30,000-€40,000) first appeared in John Shinnors' exhibition 12 New Paintings at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Waterford in 2021. Its emergence can be traced to the recently installed (2013) Lisnagry level-crossing on the road between Limerick city and Castleconnell. Shinnors late wife Catherine was born in this County Limerick village and the couple would regularly visit her family there. Their route from Roxborough in the south of the city would take them past this striking addition. The red of the gates would not have escaped Shinnors eye on these jaunts. He has a penchant for cadmium red and his paintings featuring that assertive and useful (it fades less) colour tend to be popular with his buyers.
Included in the sale is the Ceadogn PLACE collection which features eleven original wall hangings created in collaboration with eleven contemporary artists. PLACE invited the artists to explore their relationship with the natural world. The resulting collection reflects a wide range of responses to landscape, memory, ecology and belonging, transformed into hand-crafted textile works that celebrate the expressive possibilities of wool. Each piece has been meticulously handcrafted in Ceadogn’s Wexford workshops using primarily archived wool as a limited edition of five, with the exhibition piece representing the first edition. The collection can be viewed at The Irish Georgian Society, City Assembly House, 58 South William Street, Dublin 2 D02 X751, 17-27 September and will be auctioned as lots 146-156 in Whyte’s auction. (Serena Caulfied, Foxtrot)
There are major works included by William Conor, Aloysius O’Kelly, John Lavery, Grace Henry, George Campbell, Patrick Hennessy, John Doherty (illustrated below) and many others.
Watch out for… a collection of works from international artists including Cyril Edward Power, Carl Reichert, Thomas Blinks, Charles Burton Barber and an unopened, mint condition, limited-edition ‘Bigger Book’ from the late David Hockney. An important portrait of Oliver Cromwell attibuted to Robert Walker should generate some interest while there is a sculpture section including artists such as Graham Knuttel, John Coll and F. E. McWilliam. Other popular artists in the sale include Markey Robinson, Ciaran Clear, Kenneth Webb, Arthur Maderson and many others.
