A widely exhibited Yeats painting from 1948 – Sleep by Falling Water – heads the James Adam sale of Important Irish Art in Dublin on December 3. It is estimated at 120,000-180,000. Prime offerings among the 165 lots are by Yeats, Paul Henry and Walter Osborne. The catalogue cover is a dramatic composition by Paul Henry. Early Morning in Donegal (70,000-120,000) features a bent, bare, windswept tree against a lake and mountain backdrop. Walter Osborne’s 1899 Portrait of Mrs. Meade has an estimate of 80,000-120,000.
Styles vary from a Cubist Landscape by Mary Swanzy (10,000-15,000), through landscapes, seascapes, farm scenes, sculpture and portraits by artists from le Brocquy to Lavery and A Bank of Wild Flowers by Andrew Nicholl (3,000-5,000). The range encompasses a nude by Patrick Collins, an Aubusson tapestry by Louis le Brocquy of Adam and Eve in the Garden (80,000-120,000) and a selection of seven works by Mark O’Neill from the collection of the Sandhouse Hotel in Donegal. There is even a painting by Ireland’s Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats, who attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1884-85.