A small pencil sketch of a country fair by Jack B. Yeats is similar in size to one Aidan Foley sold recently for €2,000 at Sixmilebridge. It comes up among about 180 lots of art at Foley’s sale on August 14 including work by Mark O’Neill, Arthur Maderson, John Morris, Markey Robinson, John Kingerlee and the British born Co. Tipperary based Michael Hales. The appetite for art at auction in Ireland is undiminished and paintings will be to the fore at Foley’s sale at Kilcolgan, Co. Galway and at Hegarty’s in Bandon on August 17. Both sales are online.
Michael Hales, whose abstract art is gathering a growing band of admirers, has his studio at Emly and cites Bridget Riley, Gerhard Richter and Sean Scully as influences. His work can be seen as part of a group show at the Kenmare Windows exhibition until August 28 where exhibitors are displayed in the windows of local businesses and Kenmare Butter Market as well as the Carnegie Arts Centre. He has had various shows around Tipperary, at Cahir, Cashel and Tipperary Town and was recently at the Royal Ulster Academy’s 140th annual exhibition.
If art is hot the same cannot be said for much of the antique furniture that surfaces at sales like Aidan Foleys. The auctioneer is offering a mahogany four drawer chest tomorrow that would fit in any house or apartment. It will, he predicts, go for €100 or less. Demand for lots like Georgian drop leaf tables, a cross banded Victorian pembroke table, cheval mirrors and rosewood card tables, all of which feature in the sale tomorrow, remains weak even though antique furniture is the ultimate buy for those who want to go green and save the planet.
Noted for the naturalness of his drawing and his play on light and shade the British watercolourist Samuel Prout (1783-1852) is credited with elevating the art of architectural drawing to new heights. Among his pupils was the critic John Ruskin who once remarked: “Sometimes I tire of Turner but never of Prout”. A definitive collection of over 60 works by Prout as well as by his son Samuel Gillespie Prout (1822-1911) and his nephew John Skinner Prout (1805-1876) will kick off the sale at Hegarty’s on Wednesday. One of the more expensively estimated works by Samuel Prout is The Mill, a watercolour which depicts a house and watermill overlooking a stream. It is estimated at €2,500-€4,500. There are many less expensively estimated works by the Prout family from €300 up. A Quayside Scene by Samuel Prout is estimated at €300-€600 and a watercolour of Ratisbon Cathedral (modern day Regensberg) by Samuel Gillespie Prout is estimated at €500-€700. The Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery holds a collection of work by Samuel Prout. Among other lots of note at Hegarty’s is a portrait of a young female by John Butler Yeats (1839-1922) from the Yeats family collection. It is thought to be of his daughter Lily who often sat for her father and is estimated at €1,000-€2,000. Poppies in Sunlight by Kenneth Webb is estimated at €3,000-€5,000. Kenneth Webb is to be the subject of an exhibition at Gladwell and Patterson, Beauchamp Place, London next month.