DUBLIN.- Whyte's auction of Important Irish Art promises to deliver another exciting opportunity for collectors to acquire rare artworks of outstanding quality and enduring value. On Monday 23 November 2026 the auction has 147 lots of Important art valued at €1.8 million.
'Am I on the Right Road for the Sea?' (lot 18, €150,000-€200,000) is a late Jack Yeats' painting that questionS the meaning of life - through characters that have become familiar through the years. His maternal grandfather in Sligo ran cargo boats back and forth to Liverpool, on which, at the end of a holiday, the family started their way back to the house in London. Jack, who stayed behind in his formative years, and went to school in Sligo, spent every spare moment on the quays, following the sailors into their homes to hear the gossip. Here, a young bright face under a sailor's cap appears at the small window of a cottage - perhaps a small pub or a shop in the country, a shelf full of glass bottles reflecting the warm vermillion of the doorpost. He is smart, with a neat moustache, and his face lights up as he leans in to catch the exact directions. Yeats symbolises the allegory of life, the simple existence he experienced in childhood exchanged for a journey with questions, but the buoyant appearance of the young man suggests that he is well prepared and knows he will find his way.
Titles were an integral part of Yeats's paintings, particularly in his late work as it became more abstract. The Plains of Mayo (lot 20, Estimate €120,000-€180,000) perhaps has a note of nostalgia in it, remembering one of his visits to Mayo as a young man. Jack Yeats creates an imaginary scene, where a youth has thrown himself down on a hillock, to gaze at the undulating landscape before him, crowned by the familiar shape of Croagh Patrick on the horizon, a traditional place of pilgrimage in Mayo. The colours and tone of the painting are similar to those in The Singing Horseman, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, and also of 1949.
In 1905 John Millington Synge was commissioned to write a series of articles for the Manchester Guardian on the distress in what were known as the 'congested districts' in the West of Ireland. He asked Jack Yeats to come with him on his journey of investigation through Galway and Mayo, and to make illustrations for the articles. Mayo Fair [The Small Town], 1905 (lot 21, €30,000-€40,000). Yeats illustrated Synge's observations in each article. When it came to 'The Small Town', in which Synge highlighted Swinford in County Mayo, and remarked that the fair had started there first, after which the town grew up around it, he chose 'Market Day', a time when the town became alive, and he illustrated it from Synge's vivid description.
Throughout his career Walter Osborne was attracted to street and market subjects - from his early years in Flanders and Brittany, in England, and then later in Dublin, Galway and Connemara. Osborne knew the area of St. Patrick's well, and had painted an interior of the cathedral. But, as Jeanne Sheehy asserts in her biography of the artist, 'In the nineties Osborne worked a lot in the market area of Dublin around Christ Church and St. Patrick's…' In contrast to the sunshine and colour of his Breton market subjects, Osborne's Dublin scenes are quite sombre and earthy in tone. Yet, A Bit of Old Dublin (lot 6, Estimate €100,000-€150,000), although of a brown and umber tonality, sparkles with touches of blue, white and pink. The picture is crowded with figures, about fourteen women, stallholders, children, infants, shoppers and passers-by, and the presence of a donkey on the right-hand side gives a friendly rustic touch. The picture is of quite large dimensions for a pastel, as big as several of Osborne's major oils on canvas. Indeed, so skillful and deft is the artist's touch with pastel that it is almost as if he is painting with oil on canvas. The work sold for a record price for an Osborne pastel when it fetched 15,500 at auction in 1979.
Letitia Hamilton painted Lough Mask a number of times exploring the surrounding landscape, mountains, bog, thorn trees, the dwellings of its inhabitants and the changing weather all through her distinctive lens of a pastel palette and a textured application of paint. In the present work (lot 19, €10,000-€15,000) the foreground is dominated by a rocky terrain at the water's edge and the heathers and grasses that cover it. Upper Lough Mask together with Self Portrait in the Mirror (lot 15) and French Courtyard (lot 16) have all been consigned to auction from the artist's family, a highly desirable provenance. Having first visited Venice in the autumn of 1923, Hamilton became enchanted by the unique light and landscape of Italy. Throughout the 1930s, she made regular painting excursions across Northern Italy, moving between Florence, Siena, Venice, and the Northern Italian Lakes—including Lake Garda and the lesser-known, highly picturesque Lake Orta (lot 25, €8,000-€12,000). This work along with 25 others in the sale come from the Collection of Muriel Ryan who served as the Artistic Director of Abbey Stained Glass Studios, a celebrated third-generation family business based in Kilmainham, Dublin. Alongside her husband, Managing Director Ken Ryan, she played a vital role in preserving and shaping Ireland's architectural glass heritage for several decades.
Colin Middleton's Muriel, 1939 (lot 50, Estimate €80,000-€100,000) was painted only months into the Second World War, and the painting has an air of ambiguity and isolation that perhaps reflects the environment in which Middleton was living at that time. It was also less then six months since the sudden death of Middleton's first wife, Maye, which had an enormous impact on him. It belongs to a small group of paintings of single female figures in highly stylised urban locations, and was included in Middleton's extensive first one-person exhibition, held in 1943 at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery. Although it was not directly connected to the symbolist or metaphysical meaning of the main body of the exhibition, included instead in a separate section, Muriel explores the female archetype that was central to Middleton's work.
In 1937, when Coastal Landscape with Trees and Cottages (lot 51, €30,000-€40,000) was completed, Colin Middleton was twenty-seven years old. His first ever exhibition, with the short lived Ulster Unit, which included fellow Northern artist John Luke, had taken place just three years previously. 1937 was a decidedly happy period in the artist's life. This work with its serene northern landscape and soothing autumnal palette mirrors the artist's mood and his fondness for his surroundings.
Louis le Brocquy is widely recognised as one of the greatest Irish artists of the twentieth century, and no collection of Irish art of the period would be complete without his inclusion. The current painting, Fantail Pigeons (lot 71, €60,000-€80,000), was exhibited in early 1985 in the Taylor Galleries show, 'Louis le Brocquy, Procession with Lilies and Other New Work'. It comprised imagery that the artist identified as providing a revitalising divergence from the celebrated Head series which had dominated his work during the previous twenty years. Dorothy Walker illuminated the emergence and impact of the paintings in a review, observing how ' … in his paintings of doves or fan-tailed white pigeons: their fluttery featheriness is transmuted into fluttery white paint not by attempting any realistic reproduction of a dove but by means of an image having its own inherent reality.
There are major works included by Sir Fredercick William Burton, Aloysius O'Kelly, Roderic O'Conor, Frank McKelvey, Mary Swanzy (illustrated below), Daniel O'Neill, Genieve Figgis and many others.
Watch out for… a collection of Mainie Jelllet rug designs (lots 44-46), Louis le Brocquy Tan and Dubliners prints (Estimates from €1,000-€3,000 each) a collection of four Donald Teskey works on paper. Other popular artists in the sale include Athur Maderson, Ciaran Clear, Kenneth Webb, Liam O'Neill and many others.
The live auction will take place at the Freemasons Hall, Molesworth Street, Dublin 2 and online at bid.whytes.ie. Viewing takes place at Whyte's Galleries in Molesworth Street from Monday 16 to Friday 20 November, 10am to 5pm, Saturday and Sunday 21 & 22 September, 1pm to 5pm and Monday 23 November – day of sale - 10am to 4pm. Bidders & browsers can avail of useful auction features on Whytes.ie such as extra photographs of each work, including in domestic settings, as well the free Art Realizer App allowing you to project pictures to scale on walls to see if a work will suit your home or office; frame sizes and condition notes for every lot are published on our website. Most importantly, Whyte's provide a lifetime guarantee for every lot in the sale.
