The Islands by Vivien John (1915-1994) UPDATE: THIS MADE €120 AT HAMMER
Aidan Foley’s online evening auctions on June 22 and 23, now on view in Doneraile, offer 122 lots of paintings and prints headed by a Translucent Study by Francis Tansey and a pencil sketch of Lily Yeats by John Butler Yeats. There is a Regency style three pillar dining table, a Victorian boot and stick stand, a Victorian oak consul table, an Edwardian Sutherland table and a pair of gilt framed armchairs among a selection of 82 lots of furniture. A selection of pub memorabilia, garden furniture, porcelain and crystal and a wide variety of collectibles is on offer.
A gem set and diamond bracelet. UPDATE: THIS MADE 7,000 AT HAMMER
This gem set and diamond bracelet is among the leading lots at Adam’s Jewellery Box sale in Dublin on June 23. Mounted in 18 carat gold with partial Italian registry marks it contains rubies, sapphires, emeralds, citrines, amethysts, tourmalines, peridots, aquamarines topazes, morganites and diamonds. The estimate is €7,000-€8,000. A total of 336 lots will come under the hammer.
Claude Monet – Nymphéas. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £40,760,000
Nymphéas (1907) by Monet at Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary evening auction in London on June 24 carries the highest estimate ever placed on a work by the artist at auction in Europe. Painted in 1907 the ethereal and luminous view of Monet’s famed water lily pond at Giverny is estimated at £30-£40 million. Together with the Lewis Collection and other major works on the same evening the painting arrives at a defining moment for the London art market, bringing an exceptional concentration of museum-quality works to auction.
ART DECO WALNUT AND CHROME CONSOLE TABLE. UPDATE: THIS MADE 1,200
This Art Deco console table of inverted triangular form is lot 89 at Mullen’s timed online auction which runs at Laurel Park, Bray, Co. Wicklow until the evening of June 21. The estimate is €1,200-€1,800. There are 629 lots on a catalogue which features art, twenty lots of garden furniture, furniture and a wide selection of collectibles.
This lithograph by Henry Moore is at Whyte’s summer online art auction which runs until June 29. Number 9 from an edition of 50 is signed on the lower right and estimated at €1,000-€1,500. The sale of 242 lots includes work by Jack Butler Yeats, Walter Osborne, Estella Solomons, Eva Hamilton, Harry Kernoff, Daniel O’Neill, James Brohan, Liam Treacy, Bridget Flinn, Banksy and Nelson Mandela. Viewing gets underway at Molesworth St. in Dublin today and the catalogue is online.
Scene in Braemar by Sir Edwin Landseer, a little known sister painting to The Monarch of the Glen, is at Sotheby’s Old Masters evening sale in London on July 1. The estimate is £3-£4 million. Painted by 1857, the nearly nine-foot canvas has long been understood as a darker and more mysterious sister painting toLandseer’s iconic image of the Highland stag – one of the most recognisable symbols of British art.
The title locates the scene at Braemar in the eastern Highlands, close to Mar Lodge, where Landseer frequently stayed while stalking in the Deeside forests. This was the part of Scotland he knew most intimately – near Blair Atholl, another of his regular haunts, and Balmoral, the royal residence built for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who were among his most important patrons.
A FAMILLE ROSE EXPORT PORCELAIN ‘SCOTSMEN’ PLATE. UPDATE: THIS WAS UNSOLD
One of the more unusual lots at Adam’s Asian and Tribal art auction on June 25 is this Qianlong Scotsmen plate. The ‘Scotsmen’ or ‘Highlanders’ decoration count as one of the most important and iconic imageries seen on Chinese export art. The figures in the centre depict a piper and a private from the 42nd Regiment of Foot, a predecessor to the famous Black Watch. Members of the regiment deserted the Stuart cause, known as Jacobitism, which aimed to restore the House of Stuart to the throne. On July 18, 1743, Corporals Samuel and Malcolm McPherson and Private Farquar Shaw were executed at the Tower for the mutiny, and a Piper Macdonnel was sent to Georgia, USA, as a convict. These men were seen as Jacobite martyrs, and memorialised on plates and punch bowls bearing these figures. This plate dates to 1745-50 and is estimated at €1,500-€3,000.
Amadeo Modigliani – Nu assis au collier. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £48,235,000
The 25 defining masterpieces of modern figurative painting from the Lewis Collection at Sotheby’s on June 24 constitute the most valuable single collection ever offered in London.
A nude considered scandalous by Modigliani leads an auction which features stellar artists like Picasso, Schiele, Bacon, Klimt, Freud, Caillebotte and Toulouse-Lautrec. Modigliani’s sensuous Nu assis au collier (Seated nude with necklace) ranks among the most important works by the artist ever to come to market. It is estimated to make around £45 million (€52.1 million). Painted in 1917 it belongs to a series now widely regarded as pivotal in the evolution of modern art, but considered so outrageous at the time the exhibition in which they featured was shut down by the police. Modigliani is one of a rare coterie of artists to have broken the $100 million threshold at auction, not just once but twice – each time in New York. Both were works from this series. The mantle now passes to London where this is one of the highest value works of any kind ever offered in the city and the highest value work by Modigliani ever to be offered in Europe.
Pablo Picasso – Buste de Femme. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £23,855,000
A suite of seven works by Picasso spans eight full decades of his career. The group is led by a highly unusual and evocative portrait of Dora Maar, the vibrant, fiercely independent artist who first attracted his attention by playing ‘knife roulette’ between her splayed fingers on an adjacent table at Les Deux Magots in Paris. As well as becoming Picasso’s muse and lover Maar also became his indispensable intellectual and artistic sparring partner. Given both the provocative nature of their nine year relationship and the tumultuous backdrop against which it unfolded (the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War), the vast majority of Picasso’s renditions of Dora Maar are angular and jagged in form. Buste de femme, unseen for over half a century, is a rare example of something quite different – a generous, sweepingly lyrical rendition of the Dora Maar with whom Picasso was still entirely besotted in 1938 when this work was painted.
Egon Schiele – Danaë. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £17,932,500
With its jewel like surface and geometric patterning Egon Schiele’s Danaë – painted when the artist was just 19 – is seen as a key breakthrough work. Here Schiele imagines the mythological scene in which Zeus descends on Danaë in a shower of golden rain, its heaviness accentuated by the introduction of greens and blacks. Schiele died in the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 aged just 28.
Bacon’s Two Studies for a Self-Portrait was made in 1977 and captures an artist beset by inner turmoil. Following the suicide of his love George Dyer in 1971 Bacon launched into a period of production that would become the most emotionally fraught but ambitious of his career. Behind these works lies a decade of guilt, bereavement, and self-scrutiny, marked by the deaths of many of those closest to him – not only George Dyer, but also Peter Lacey. When asked in 1979 why he made so many self-portraits, Bacon explained: “people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint but myself.”
Many of the works in a sale estimated to make in the region of £200 million (€231.5 million) have been shown in major museums across the globe. They were assembled over decades by Joe Lewis and his daughter Vivienne. Born and raised in London’s East End, Joe Lewis felt a natural affinity as a collector with the School of London painters, such as Bacon and Freud, whose work confronted the human condition with an uncompromising intensity. That early passion became the foundation for what is today one of the world’s most important private collections of modern art, shaped by a fascination with the human figure in all its forms.
Over the years the collection has been re-shaped. The Lewis journey as collectors is far from over. “We remain committed to the avant garde painters of today, much of whose work is informed by the artists showcased here” a statement said.
Billionaire Joe Lewis, who left school at 15 to help his father run his father’s West End catering business, was born in 1937 to a Jewish family living above a public house in Bow, East London. He holds assets through his Tavistock Group and was previously the majority owner of ENIC Group, the majority owner of Tottenham Hotspur. Accused of tipping off associates and friends with non public information and charged with multiple counts of insider trading in New York in 2023 he pleaded guilty. Lewis was spared jail time, fined $5 million and later pardoned by Donald Trump. His art collection is estimated to be worth $1 billion.
Francis Bacon – Two Studies for self-portrait. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £8,675,000
A platinum aquamarine and diamond ring is lot 174 at the current online sale of fine jewellery and watches at Adams Blackrock. It is estimated at €2,000-€3,000. There are watches by Rolex, Piaget and Tag Heuer and a wide selection of jewellery among more than 550 lots. The auction runs until the evening of June 17.
The Moore St. Flag of Truce at Fonsie Mealy’s sale. UPDATE: THIS MADE 62,000 AT HAMMER
In this age of digital and AI it is good to see the enduring popularity of rare book and collectors sales. All sorts of interesting lots come under the hammer. Fonsie Mealy’s three day sale in Castlecomer on June 23, 24 and 25 is headed by the Moore St. flag of truce, the white linen handkerchief which indicated the Volunteers wished to surrender their final position during the Easter Rising on April 29, 1916. Singularities like this do not come cheap and this one is estimated at €10,000-€15,000.
With more than 1,250 lots on offer there is much to choose from, including sporting memorabilia, historical and political items and literature including the first edition in English of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo and a scarce 1823 edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Viewing gets underway in Castlecomer on June 19.
In Birr the book auction with more than 600 lots at Purcell Auctioneers on June 17 offers eight folio volumes from the 1871 census arranged by province and county (€600-€800), four folio volumes from the 1881 census with more than 4,000 pages of statistical information and a first edition of Dancing at Lughnasa signed by Brian Friel (€300-€500). At Purcell’s sale in May a 15th century medieval legal manuscript in middle French from the library of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) made €36,000 at hammer.
The programme for the 1914 All Ireland Football Final refereed by the patriot and revolutionary Harry Boland at Fonsie Mealy.
