LONDON.- Sotheby’s Annual Irish Art Sale features outstanding works from private collections appearing at auction for the first time The sale includes paintings by John Luke, John Lavery, Jack Butler Yeats, Mary Swanzy and Colin Middleton.
The sale is led by the historic early painting of the Swiss Alps painted by Lavery on his winter holiday more than a century ago and unseen in public for more than 30 years.
Highlights
Lavery, The Summit of the Jungfrau, oil on canvas, 1913 (est. £150,000-250,000 / €168,000-280,000)
A powerful and masterly landscape painting of Switzerland by Lavery, The Summit of the Jungfrau’s lyrical curves lead the eye up to the pinnacle whilst maintaining a sense of composure and innate design that hints at the influence of Japanese art. The British love of the Alps dates back to the early 19th century, to Turner, Byron, Shelley and Ruskin; it was actually on the recommendation of Lady Gwendoline Churchill that Lavery travelled to Wengen for a two-month stay. The highlight of the visit was a journey up to Jungfraujoch station, an enormous engineering feat that had fortuitously opened in August 1912 – after eighteen years and a cost of twelve million francs and twenty-seven lives. Lavery was thus able to make his ascent with a full painting kit, creating a temporary studio and setting for a swift sketch of the visiting party. Further works by Lavery in the sale, also on the market for the first time, include The Little White Ship, painted in Tangier (est. £12,000-18,000 / €13,500-20,200) and Japanese Garden (est. £50,000-70,000 / €56,000-78,500).
Mary Swanzy, Sun on the Sails, oil on canvas (est. £50,000-70,000 / €56,000-78,500)
Appearing on the market for the first time, Swanzy’s Sun on the Sails and reveals her advanced grasp of modernist movements in Paris, with swirling shards of colour creating a dynamic, Cubist composition. With every glimpse, subtle spatial shifts give the illusion of motion as interlocking planes disturb the pictorial surface, seducing the eye. Swanzy’s defiant brush pushed boundaries, troubled tradition and, with time, prised open the doors of some of Dublin’s most conservative galleries. Modernism had swept through Europe and Swanzy foresaw how radical, contemporary styles such as Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism would free the palette and revolutionise Irish art.
John Luke, Northern Rhythm, tempera on board, 1946 (est. £100,000-150,000 / €112,000-168,000)
Northern Rhythm is one of twelve small jewel-like oil and tempera paintings Luke made at Knappagh farm in Killylea, Co. Armagh, in Northern Ireland between 1943 and 1948. Critics have agreed that this was the most productive and significant period of the artist’s entire career, and his most cohesive body of work. James White, the Dublin art critic, and later Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, who travelled to Armagh to see these paintings, claimed they had the ‘innocence of a visionary’ and directly compared the artist to the painters of the Italian renaissance. Working in the traditional tempera technique and later in fresco, Luke always painted on a white gesso ground on board and refused to use readymade paint from a tube, preferring to mix his own pigments with fresh egg yolks. His pictorial style itself was a synthesis of the Flemish Primitives, quattrocento Italian art, and Greek and Egyptian sculpture. He was also influenced by the work of contemporary English Neo-Romantic artists, and particularly the work of Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Edward Wadsworth, John Armstrong and Rex Whistler, as well as the Irish painters Paul Henry and Jack B. Yeats. The painting, with its fantastical mountains, billowing clouds and mysterious female figure and hound, is the summation of many of the artist’s ideas, especially his interest in rhythm. Luke’s nephew later recalled the artist telling him ‘while he painted Northern Rhythm he had Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony in his head’.
Roderic O’Conor, La fenêtre, oil on canvas (est. £40,000-60,000 / €44,800-67,500)
This newly rediscovered work by O’Conor has only had two owners since it left the artist’s studio. The painting was exhibited in Paris during the artist’s lifetime and is still known by the title he gave it. Despite its title, the painting is much more of a portrait and invites speculation as to who the model might have been. O’Conor has created a cultured ambience for his young subject, with a framed picture from his private collection hanging in the background and an open book placed on the table in front of her. This corner of the artist’s studio was a spot he used regularly for still lifes and figurative subjects, attracted by the propensity of the light to almost sculpt the forms it fell upon. The artist’s Nude Seated on a Chaise Longue also features in the sale (est. £70,000-100,000 / €78,500-112,000).
Alongside Sotheby’s sale of the Yeats Family Collection on 27 September, this year’s Irish Art sale includes two paintings by Jack Butler Yeats. Painted in 1946, Railway Refreshment Room, which has remained in a private collection for over 50 years, depicts three figures in the dining car of a railway train as it surges headlong through the Irish landscape. The travellers gaze out of the large carriage windows as the countryside swirls past in an ebullient symphony of colour and movement. A habitual rail traveller, Yeats regularly referenced his encounters with other passengers and the memories of the landscape rushing by in his painting and writing. This reflective work is as much a joyful celebration of the landscape of Ireland, shimmering in whites and pinks from the carriage window, as it is a contemplative musing on the human journey (est. £80,000-120,000 / €89,500-135,000).
Previously unrecorded and emerging on the market for the first time, A Fortune presents a group of Yeats’s typical characters against the grey backdrop of a city quay, chatting near a vaguely defined vehicle. In this beautifully described, tantalising and dramatic image, Yeats compels the viewer to fill in the narrative and the details. The image ultimately derives from what he termed as a ‘half memory’ of one of the many melodramas he saw, and relished, as a young man (est. £60,000-80,000 / €67,500-89,500).
Opening the auction is a pen and ink Self-Portrait by the artist, offered with a letter addressed to the original owner in which he wrote: ‘I send a drawing of myself done by myself some years ago and flattering then’ (est. £5,000-7,000 / €5,600-7,900).
Colin Middleton, The Life Everlasting, oil on canvas, 1950 (est. £50,000-70,000 / €56,000-78,500)
Also making its first auction appearance, The Life Everlasting was part of a small group of works by Middleton shown in London, Europe and the USA under the representation of art dealer Victor Waddington, an exhibition strategy devised to ensure that certain key paintings by the artist were seen by as wide a public as possible. Completed late in 1950, this multi-figure composition on a large scale was shown in the 1951 Irish Exhibition of Living and praised at length in the Dublin Magazine review of the exhibition for its ‘glorious’ colour, ‘the instrument whereby he expresses a poetic vision of everyday life. Waddington exhibited the painting as the centrepiece of a small group of Middleton’s paintings in his gallery window in August 1952, shortly before it was included in his first solo exhibition in London. Middleton’s complex response to the post-war world is at the heart of his work at this time. The adoption of a more expressive and direct manner of using paint, with a vibrant and contrasting palette and a very physically worked paint surface, matches the intensity of his subject matter.
Further works by the artist in the sale emerging from private collections for the first time include Girl Calling (est. £20,000-30,000 / €22,400-33,600), Evening Landscape with Boats (est. £8,000-12,000 / €9,000-13,500) and Fishermen’s Houses (est. £15,000-25,000 / €16,800-28,000).
Gerard Dillon, Potato Patch, oil on board (est. £25,000-35,000 / €28,000-39,200)
In the summer of 1939 Dillon set off on a cycling tour of Ireland, chasing the simplicity and light of the Irish countryside. It was during this trip that he discovered the magic of Connemara, the setting of Potato Patch. Deliberately naïve, the painting captures a landscape of pastoral bliss, where emerald grasslands and sapphire waters infuse it with a sense of colour and joy, a peaceful innocence which offered relief from urban claustrophobia in Belfast and London. For Dillon, Connemara was not only his home but also his muse, inspiring some of his most celebrated works. This work was exhibited in New York in October 1963 in conjunction with an expedition of over 130 representatives of industrial designers and artists from Ireland. They were flown out to America with the Irish Trade and Culture delegation following the visit of President Kennedy to Ireland in June that year. Also fresh to the market is the artist’s The Widow Woman (est. £20,000-30,000 / €22,400-33,600).
A group of four works by Daniel O’Neill features Circus Children (est. £12,000-18,000 / €13,500-20,200) and Interior (est. £10,000-15,000 / €11,200-16,800).
Basil Blackshaw, The Fall, oil on canvas (est. £100,000-150,000 / €112,000-168,000)
A major example by the artist, The Fall is emblematic of a way of life for Basil Blackshaw who had horses in his blood. Replete with a jockey literally coming close to walking on air, the painting seethes with energy and drama to create a highly charged image. With its sense of foreboding and imminent calamity, The Fall captures the inherent risks in the sport of horse racing. The artist was experiencing extraordinary turmoil in his private life during this period, following the breakdown of his marriage. He continued to live in the heart of the country in County Down and Antrim where he found all the raw material for his art.
Hughie O’Donoghue, Medusa III, oil and mixed media on canvas, 2006 (est. £20,000-30,000 €22,400-33,600)
Often executed on a large and imposing scale, Hughie O’Donoghue’s paintings encapsulate themes of mythology, the human experience and the echoes of history. Medusa III is part of a series in which he engages with the past using personal records of his father’s experience of World War II to create intense and emotionally powerful images. In this magnificent, eerie painting O’Donoghue portrays an abandoned ship where the hull and keel are visible, the rust of the tired ship echoed in the palette of burnt umber, sienna and ochre.
Property from the estate of T. P. Flanagan comprises a diptych by Flanagan – generally regarded as the finest landscape painter to work in Ireland in the late twentieth century – Boglands 4 (est. £12,000-18,000 / €13,500-20,200), and three sculptures by F. E. McWilliam acquired directly from McWilliam by the artist, led by Icon (est. £30,000-50,000 / €33,600-56,000).
A selection of sculptures in the sale include works by John Behan (Bull, bronze, est. £8,000-12,000 / €9,000-13,500), Stephen Lawlor (Horse, est. £4,000-6,000 / €4,500-6,800), John Kelly (Three Cows in a Pile, est. £10,000-15,000 / €11,200-16,800) and Rowan Gillespie (O’Carolyn (Spirit of the Blind Harpist), est. £20,000-30,000 / €22,400-33,600).
For the first time, the Irish Art sale includes a Design piece, Joseph Walsh’s ‘Enignum II’ Chair (olive ash, suede, from an open edition (est. £8,000-12,000 / €9,000-13,500).
