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Mother and Daughter by F. E. McWilliam comes up as lot 49 at Sotheby’s Made in Britain sale online until March 14. The bronze is 45 and a quarter inches tall and 22 inches wide. Conceived in 1957 it is number 2 from an edition of 3. The estimate is £30,000-£50,000.
The difference between equity and equality is the focus of Genesis, a show by six female artists which opens on International Women’s Day today at HOFA Gallery in Mayfair, London. Among the exhibitors is Kildare based Mary Ronayne who focuses on the reality of inequity in her better known portraits and fete galantes. She exposes it through the unease and doubtful looks of people, especially women, who seem to question their situation while engaged in pleasurable pastimes. Curator Simonida Pavicevic says female artists face unequal barriers to entry and unequal representation. “Equity matters if we are to achieve lasting equality for women, especially in the contemporary art world”.
The first private museum in Japan dedicated to the works of Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita has been helped by the private sales department at Christie’s in New York to acquire a major picture by the artist. Classe de chats is on display in the Ando Museum of Art in Karuizawa, Japan until September 12 next 2023 as part of the exhibition Tsuguharu Foujita: Room for Cats and Girls.
Cats played an important role for Foujita on a personal level and in his art. He depicted them with tenderness on their own, as companions in portraiture, and later in life as anthropomorphic animals in lively scenes. Animals with humanlike qualities had populated the myths of his childhood, and are famously depicted in ukiyo-e prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, but also from Western sources, such as La Fontaine’s Fables. Classe de chats ranks among the masterpieces Foujita painted during his one-year stay in New York in 1949. A New York paper declared then that: “No living artist can depict cats in action whilst capturing such variety of expression.”
Two Horses, an oil on canvas by Liam O’Neill made a hammer price of €35,000 over a top estimate of €7,000 at Whyte’s sale of Important Irish Art in Dublin tonight. Another work by the self taught artist Collecting Hay by the Coast, made €17,000 over a top estimate of €12,000. Liam O’Neill has developed a reputation as one of our finest portrayers of rural life, especially around West Kerry. He is a native of the Dingle Peninsula.
The top lot of the sale was Paul Henry’s Landscape, Connemara which made €135,000 at hammer. Old Houses, Pau by Dan O’Neill made €56,000, Docklands VII 2002 by Donald Teskey made €46,000, The Enthusiast by Jack B Yeats made €32,000 and Strange Days by Jim Fitzpatrick made €19,000.
First into Calabria by Camille Souter sold for a hammer price of €18,000 at the James Adam sale of Important Irish Art in Dublin on May 1. The artist died on March 3 aged 93. This mixed media work, signed and dated 1962, had a top estimate of €15,000 and was previously in the collection of Sir Basil Goulding. It was exhibited in a show of 12 Irish Painters in New York in 1963. Another work by Souter in the same sale, Red Achill, made a hammer price of €10,000 over a top estimate of 8,000. Born in the UK and brought up in Ireland, Camille Souter trained as a nurse in London before turning to painting in the 1950s and exhibited extensively from the 1960s onwards. She is credited with having produced an extraordinary body of work over nearly 70 years.
Adams sale brought in €1.25 million and was headed by Orpen’s portrait of Yvonne Aupicq as a nun which made €125,000 over a top estimate of €50,000 after a battle between seven bidders. It went to a UK based agent.
Sean Scully’s Wall of Light, Red sold for £1,137,000 at Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary evening auction in London on March 1. The monumental work from his most celebrated and instantly recognised Wall of Light series was made in 1998 and is among the largest and earliest works in the series. The oil on linen is on two joined canvases. The inspiration came from a visit to Mexico in the early 1980’s where he was fascinated by the stones of ancient walls on the Yucatan peninsula. When animated by light they seemed to reflect the passage of time.
“I can’t exactly explain it, but seeing the Mexican ruins, the stacking of the stones, and the way light hit those facades, had something to do with it, maybe everything to do with it” the artist is quoted as saying in an exhibition catalogue at the Metropolitian Museum, New York in 2005.
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.
A knife, fork and spoon, stitched to a silk shamrock and framed with a photograph of Michael Collins, form a curious lot at Mullen’s Collector’s Cabinet auction on March 11. This was the cutlery used by Collins at his last meal in the Eldon Hotel in Skibbereen on August 22, 1922, just hours before the ambush at Béal na mBláth later that day. It was later presented to Kitty Kiernan, who gave it to her sister Maud. Maud married Gearóid O’Sullivan, the Irish Volunteer who raised the flag over the GPO during the Easter Rising. It is estimated at €1,500-€2,000. UPDATE: THIS MADE 6,500 AT HAMMER
This 1986 oil and collage on toned paper by Tony O’Malley comes up as lot 9 at Morgan O’Driscoll’s Irish art online auction which runs until March 7. It is signed with a monogram on the lower left and measures 6.2″ x 9.6″. The estimate is €1,500-2,500. The catalogue for the sale is online.
November on the Liffey by Norah McGuinness is one of a number of works by the artist at Whyte’s sale of Important Irish Art on March 6. A major retrospective of her work took place in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, in 1968 and in 1973 the College awarded her an honorary doctorate. This work, with a Dawson Gallery lable on the reverse, is estimated at 8,000-12,000. The catalogue for the sale is online. The sale is on view in Molesworth St., Dublin until 4 pm on March 6.
