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A Beckett painting by Cian McLoughlin sold for a hammer price of 30,000 over an estimate of 6,000-10,000 at the James Adam Mid Century Modern sale in Dublin today. A second diptych, Pozo and Lucky, made 14,500 at hammer over a top estimate of 10,000. They came from the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. In 2006 the Beckett Centenary Festival Committee, with the Gate Theatre and the Department of Arts, Tourism and Sport, launched an exhibition by Cian McLoughlin which explored Beckett’s three main plays – ‘End Game’, ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ and ‘Waiting for Godot’. McLoughlin spent three years talking to, studying and painting the actors who had become synonymous with Beckett’s masterpieces, producing large scale portraits that strove to display not the actor, but the character which they embodied.

Commissioned by the Shelbourne Hotel in 2007 the diptychs capture the tragic couplings of Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) and Pozzo and Lucky from ‘Waiting for Godot’. Encroaching as spectres from the fog, the faces of Barry McGovern, Johnny Murphy, Alan Stanford and Stephen Brennan are transformed.