No less than seven works by Norah McGuinness, including an arresting self portrait, come up at Whyte’s spring sale of Important Irish Art on March 6. The enduring popularity of the artist should ensure plenty of bidders.During a long career Norah McGuinness found a balance between painting and her design work (she designed theatre sets and costumes, illustrated books and the sales windows of Altmans in New York and Brown Thomas in Dublin for over 30 years). Influences from each field were brought into the other. Unlike her contemporaries, Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, who also studied in Paris under André Lhote, McGuinness did not fully adopt the Cubist approach but rather fashioned elements of it with a Fauvist appreciation of colour to create her own unique reading of her subject. The seven works in this sale include November on the Liffey (1948) (€8,000-€12,000), Self-Portrait 1942 (€5,000-€7,000) and Coastal Town by Moonlight, 1962 (€7,000-€9,000).
Other works by Irish female artists of the same period include The Businessman by Mary Swanzy (€6,000- €8,000) and a 1920’s work by Mainie Jellett titled Ávila, Spain (€6,000-€8,000). This was painted on one of her first visits to Europe and subsequently gifted by the artist to Sarah Purser, and later gifted to the artist Rosaleen Davey. The top lot of the auction is an iconic west of Ireland scene by Paul Henry which is estimated at €100,000-€150,000. Old Houses, Pau by Daniel O’Neill is estimated at.€20,000-€30,000 and his Mother and Child has an estimate of €15,000- €20,000. Colin Middleton also had a design background and there is an emphasis on texture in his 1976 painting titled Dark Lady (€25,000-€35,000). Marmara Dawn by Stephen McKenna is a large work painted in 2009, his final year as president of the RHA. It is estimated at €15,000-€20,000.