The June selling season of Irish art kicks off with an exciting sale by James Adam in Dublin this evening. But one lot will not be included. This portrait of the Limerick poet Michael Harnett by Edward McGuire has been purchased in advance of the auction by the Limerick City Gallery. It was previously at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. The artist is best known for his portraits of literary figures, including Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Durcan, Seamus Heaney, Anthony Cronin, John Montague, Francis Stuart and this one, from 1971, of Michael Hartnett.
This classic McGuire work shows a thirty-year-old Hartnett by which time Hartnett had published Poems 1958-1970, Secular Prayers, Anatomy of a Cliché, Thirteen Sonnets and Notes on My Contemporaries. Hartnett, born 1941 in Croom Co Limerick, was educated locally and at UCD. He worked for a while as curator of Joyce’s tower at Sandycove, lived in Madrid and London, returned to Dublin where he worked at the international telephone exchange, as a house painter and as a lecturer in creative writing. He moved to Newcastle West in 1974 and died in 1999.
At Adams works by many of the most famous and best loved Irish artists dating over the last 250 years are featured – from a pair of rare views of Dublin in 1775 by William Ashford, up to a monumental 2008 oil by Hughie O’Donoghue, and everything in-between.
