 |
 |
An outstanding Louis XIV period cabinet by André-Charles Boulle was the top lot at Christie’s Exceptional sale in Paris with a video link with the auction room in London today. From the collection of Sadruddin Aga Khan it made €716,000. The sale realised a total of €2,842,250. Earlier today The Collector: Le Goût français auction made €1,947,625 and attracted bidders from 21 countries. A pair of Louis XV style Chinese biscuit parrots made €47,500 a top estimate of €20,000.
Skiing, a painting by Anders Zorn is one of a number of works from the collection of Sir Michael Smurfit due to come under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London in December. This one is at an online sale of European and British art running from December 2-9. It is estimated at £300,000-500,000. Other works from the Smurfit collection in this sale are The New Standard by Sir Alfred Munnings (£260,000-360,000); Portrait of Avenal St. George by Sir William Orpen (£15,000-20,000); Kukuliku by Carl Larsson (£150,000-200,000) and Lagstadgad Mums by Helmer Osslund (£40,000-60,000). Another of his paintings, A Girl in the Studio by Yuri Penushkin comes up at Sotheby’s sale of Russian Pictures on December 1 with an estimate of £8,000-12,000.
WILLIAM Scott’s Jug made a hammer price of 85,000 at Morgan O’Driscoll’s Irish and International online art sale this evening. It was the top lot in a well chosen sale where many lots far exceeded the top estimate. Among other top hammer prices were: Paul Henry, Maam Valley (66,000); Jack Yeats, Man Hearing and Old Song (60,000); Dan O’Neill, Interior (54,000); John Shinnors, Estuary Forms, Limerick (44,000); William Conor, At Benediction (32,000); John Shinnors, Three Cats, (25,000); Donald Teskey, Pepper Canister Church, Dublin (20,000) and Patrick Scott, Gold Painting (19,000).
Daniel O’Neill Romanticism & Friendships by Karen Reihill is published today. To mark the centenary year of the Belfast born artist two events had been planned and both had to be cancelled. A retrospective exhibition at the OPW’s Farmleigh Gallery had been scheduled for May and Rehill’s monograph was to have been launched to coincide with this. The exhibition was re-scheduled to November 28 only to be postponed once again because of Covid-19. Meanwhile Reihill has decided to go ahead with the publication of the book which contains 192 Pages with 370 images in colour and period black and white photographs. It is available to from your local bookshop or on-line www.kennys.ie priced €25.00.
With a span of artists ranging from Yeats and Henry to Scott and le Brocquy the online Irish and International art auction which runs at Morgan O’Driscoll until November 23 is impressive. History buffs will find much interest in The Close of the Battle of the Nile by the Cobh painter George Mounsey Wheatley Atkinson (1806-1884). The 1798 battle between the British Royal Navy led by Admiral Nelson and the French resulted in victory for the British. The victory meant that Napoleon’s army in Egypt, cut off from help, vwas also forced to surrender. Napoleon had sought access to Egypt as a first step in a campaign against British India.Shown at The Cork Exhibition of 1883 Peter Murray notes that Atkinson, who spent some years at sea as a ships carpenter, brought his skills as a seaman and an artist to bear. The impressive composition accurately depicts at least 19 individual ships, their position and condition. The work is estimated at €6,000-€9,000.
Farmhouse and cabin furniture from all over Ireland is highlighted in an authoritative new book by Claudia Kinmonth just published by Cork University Press. Irish Country Furniture and Furnishings 1700-2000 illuminates a way of life lived by our not so distant ancestors that has almost vanished in Ireland.Lavishly illustrated, it illuminates the furniture and furnishings of rural Ireland. A chapter on chairs and stools, for example, explains how the “creepie stool” had staked legs wedged into a thick seat. This allowed for easy replacement at a time when things we built to last for many generations. The chapter on small furnishings and utensils discusses work of crafts people like basket makers, potters, tin smiths and wood turners. From the smallest cabins to the largest farmhouses people owned and made things that reflected their needs and lifestyle, occupations and cultural history at a time when re-cycling applied to everything and many objects were re-purposed. The book costs €39.
A large collection of handwritten correspondence from Terrence MacSwiney comes up at a timed online auction at Hegarty’s, Bandon from November 26-29. The sale is centred around the Pauline Henley Archive of hand written correspondence with members of the MacSwiney family dating from the early part of the 20th Century. It includes letters, telegraphs, postcards and newspaper cuttings dating from 1916 to 1922.
Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, a playwright, poet and soldier was arrested in August 1920 as British authorities imposing martial law on Cork. Once arrested and court martialled, he refused to recognise the authority of the British courts and protested by going on a hunger strike, a strike that started in Cork City, and would end in Brixton prison 74 days later on October 25th.
Interior by Dan O’Neill is lot 41 at Morgan O’Driscoll’s online sale of Irish and International Art on November 23. The oil on board is signed on the lower right. As is often the case with O’Neill’s portraits it is lit from one side. The estimate for the piece is 50,000-70,000. UPDATE: THIS MADE 54,000 AT HAMMER
Millions of euro work of Irish art is due to come under the hammer at four pre-Christmas sales by Morgan O’Driscoll (November 23); Whyte’s (December 7); de Veres (December 8) and James Adam (December 9). More than 560 lots will come under the hammer at these sales. It is a mark of the improving condition of the Irish art market that no less than nine of them have estimates in excess of 100,000. Predictably the front runners are Jack B. Yeats, William Orpen, Walter Osborne, Paul Henry and William Scott. These stellar artists notwithstanding the upcoming sales offer an appetising selection by a wide variety of artists across all price points. The number of works with high estimates recalls an oft quoted phrase of modernising Irish Taoiseach Sean Lemass in the 1960’s – “a rising tide lifts all boats”. Irish art values are once again on the up and not before time.
An Irish School family portrait dating to around 1816 is a highlight at Dreweatts online sale of the British, American and European Folk Art in Newbury, Berkshire on November 24. The portrait of William Winter and his family bears the inscription, ‘Oh pary accept this trifling gift/This token I am far from you/Yet I shall love you still/Though cruel fate has parted me/From my dear friends and loves/Yet may I soon return again/No more from you to roam’. The portrait of Private William Winter and his family was most probably painted by a professional letter-writer while he was garrisoned in Dublin in February 1816 with the 1st battalion, 48th Regiment of Foot. As the inscription along the lower edge implies he commissioned it as a token of his affection for his family in Gloucestershire. On June 17 that year Winter deserted his regiment and by July 12 had been detained and committed to imprisonment at Chester. The regiment was soon after commissioned to serve in Sydney, New South Wales.
The Pinkers Collection takes its name from a diminutive 17th century fisherman’s cottage on the Kent coast where it has grown in size over the last twenty years. It includes watercolours and oil paintings from the 17th to the early 20th Century. Many are in their original frames and in remarkably fresh condition. Folk Art has been described as ‘the unselfconscious creativity of academically untrained artists’ (Robert Young, Folk Art, 1999) and it is this quality that gives many of the works an immediacy and playfulness that has chimed with generations of collectors.
