Come on the dawn by Jack B. Yeats. UPDATE: THIS MADE €241,300
What could be better. Springtime in Paris is again enlivened this year with a feast of Irish art at Sotheby’s. Come on the dawn, a 1951 work by Jack B. Yeats (€200,000-€300,000) leads a sale supported by a global marketing campaign with Sotheby’s displaying Irish art to Paris and the world. This second edition celebrating cultural links between Ireland and France follows on from the success of an inaugural sale in 2022 which saw strong international bidding and a new world record for a work on paper by Mainie Jellett. Artists from the 19th century to the present day feature in the 2023 selection which includes Irish painters abroad and contemporary artworks. Paintings by Roderic O’Conor, Sir William Orpen and Sir John Lavery are on view alongside art and sculpture by Sean Scully, Louis le Brocquy, Rowan Gillespie, Orla de Bri, Peter Curling, Maser, Melissa O’Flaherty, Richard Hearns and Jack Coulter. The catalogue, with 50 lots, is online. The sale, now on view at Sotheby’s Paris headquarters on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, takes place on May 10.
Feeling the grass by Peter Curling. UPDATE: THIS WAS UNSOLD
Sir William Orpen R.A., R.H.A. – The Normandy Cider Press. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR €36,100
This 1900 oil on canvas by Sir William Orpen comes up as lot 12 at Sotheby’s Irish art sale in Paris. The sale is on view in Paris. It opens for bidding today and runs online until May 10. This painting was once in the collection of Oliver St. John Gogarty, who acquired it from the artist. It is estimated at €30,000-50,000.
(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for April 2, 2023)
Harry Kernoff – La Place du Tertre Montmartre at Sotheby’s Irish art sale in Paris. UPDATE; THIS MADE €50,800
Art by Harry Kernoff, Hughie O’Donoghue and Rowan Gillespie will feature among a strong selection at Sotheby’s second Irish art sale in Paris in May. Highlights from the auction will be on view at Sotheby’s on Molesworth St. in Dublin on April 3, 4 and 5. Already consigned are works by William Leech, Roderic O’Conor, John Yeats, Louis le Brocquy, Sean Scully, Patrick Scott, Basil Blackshaw, Camille Souter, LM Hamilton, Jack Coulter, Maser and Richard Hearns.
In his painting La Place du Tertre, Montmartre Harry Kernoff discreetly places himself wearing his customary trilby hat in a cafe named Jeune Peinture. It is estimated at €40,000-€60,000. Hughie O’Donoghue’s Medusa III (€15,000-€20,000) is from a series in which he engages with the past using personal records of his father’s experience of World War II to create intense and emotionally powerful images. Given that the book was first published in Paris Ripples of Ulysses, Study, 1999 (€10,000-€15,000) by Rowan Gillespie is especially apt. It relates to two life sized James Joyce sculptures, one at the Merrion Hotel, Dublin the other at Regis University, Denver. The artist places Joyce at the centre of his masterpiece, Ulysses, the words of which ripple outwards in 18 concentric circles. The sculpture spins because it is never ending.
Hughie O’Donoghue – Medusa III at Sotheby’s Paris. UPDATE; THIS WAS UNSOLD
Incrementum 2020/2023 by Richard Hearns is estimated at €8,000-€12,000. Born in Beirut during the civil war and adopted as an infant by an Irish UN peacekeeper the Burren based painter has said his dual heritage has inspired his paintings. He is considered to be one of the most exciting abstract painters working in Ireland today by Sotheby’s. The inaugural Irish art sale in Paris in May 2022 saw strong international bidding and a world record for a work on paper by Mainie Jellett. It also led to the return of many Irish artworks to this country. The success of that sale, which coincided with the centenary of the World Congress of the Irish Race in 1922, has spurred Sotheby’s on to repeat it in 2023. All international exposure of Irish art is to be welcomed. Bidding for this sale opens online on May 4 and runs until May 10. The auction will be on view at Sotheby’s, Paris on those dates.
The most important set of Don Quixote volumes to come to auction in thirty years is to be offered at auction on December 14 at Sotheby’s Paris, in conjunction with rare books dealer Jean-Baptiste de Proyart. Estimated at €400,000-600,000, this extraordinary offering comprises spectacular editions of both volumes of Cervantes prized work, presented in matching English bindings dating to 1750. With a shared provenance traceable back over 320 years, they are among the oldest known sets of both volumes together.
Beloved for its liveliness and panorama of Spanish society, Don Quixote became legendary almost immediately when released, with the author achieving fame throughout Europe and the New World, and the book being widely copied and pirated by at least three separate publishers. In the four hundred years since its publication, there are few characters who can have been as mythologised as Don Quixote. The subject of countless books, plays, performances, statues and works of art, he has been – and continues to be – both a fixture in the popular imagination and an inspiration to the great writers and thinkers of the world.
As the four Folios of Shakespeare are the highest prize of English book-collecting, and the Foligno Dante of Italian, so the early editions Don Quixote printed during of Miguel de Cervantes’s lifetime – are the highest prize of Spanish book-collecting. This edition of the world’s first modern novel is from the library of Jorge Ortiz Linares (1894-1965).
Harry Kernoff, R.H.A. – Sunday Evening – Place du Combat, Paris – sold for 94,500
A 1937 oil by Harry Kernoff – Sunday Evening, Place du Combat, Paris – sold for €94,500 over a top estimate of €60,000 at Sotheby’s Ireland / France : Art and Literature sale in Paris today. Roderic O’Conor’s Rocks and Foam, St. Guénolé sold for €352,800; Pieta by Mainie Jellett made €88,200 over a top estimate of €25,000; A Sandhill near Tralee Bay by Jack B Yeats made €50,400 as did Bottle Still Life by William Scott and The Newly Married Man by Sean Keating made €44,100. The sale total was €928,116.
A lounge suite from the couple’s flat in the former Maeterlinck Palace
A rare glimpse into the glamorous domestic world of a couple at the heart of the glittering social world of Paris in the 1970’s is offered by a sale at Sotheby’s on February 24. Best known in France and the US François Catroux was one of the most important decorators of the 21st century.François and Betty Catroux married in 1968 when she was becoming the face of Yves St. Laurent and he was decorating bold modern homes for clients like the Rothschilds, Diane von Furstenbert and Princess Firyal of Jordan. He counted Roman Abromovitch, Helene Rochas and Antenor Patino among his clients.
François Catroux elegantly mixed antiques with contemporary furniture. He brought work by contemporary designers like Ron Arad, Ingo Maurer, Martin Szekely, Serge Manzon and Ettore Sottsass together with artists like Luis Tomasello, Lucio Fontana, Tom Wesselman, Zoran Music, Victor Vasarely, Xavier Veilhan, Christian Bérard and Jean Cocteau. On offer at Sotheby’s Paris is the entire contents of the apartment he created for their retirement at the former Maeterlinck Palace overlooking the Baie des Anges at Nice. The project was barely completed when Catroux discovered he had cancer. He died in November 2020. Catroux and St. Laurent were at school together, though they never spoke of their schooldays where St. Laurent had been bullied.
In a New York Times obituary Penelope Green came up with a wonderful quote from Betty Catroux: “I’m not interested in fashion, and I’m not interested in design, and I got the two geniuses on the subject. I could live in an empty room as long as there is a bottle of wine and good music. But I know what’s beautiful. I was so lucky. It’s been a fairy tale life”.
Betty and François Catroux. Photograph: Horst P. Horst/Condé Nast archive
Works by Zao Wou-Ki and Pierre Soulages from an Irish collection are to feature at Sotheby’s Paris Art Contemporain evening sale on June 24. This sale is anchored by a museum quality selection of blue-chip Post-War and Contemporary Art. 17.5.63 by Zao Wou-Ki is estimated at 1.5-2 million, Peinture 65 by Soulages has an estimate of 500,000-700,000.
The spring 2020 edition of the Paris Contemporary Art online sale at Sotheby’s on June 3 offers a selection of works by world-renowned artists at an affordable price-point. It offers an opportunity to acquire artworks by contemporary artists such as Chiharu Shiota, Bernard Frize, Kiki Smith, Robert Combas, KAWS, Sam Francis, Jef Verheyen and many more.
More than 1,000 lots from the last residences of Pierre Bergé will come under the hammer at Sotheby’s in Paris from October 29-31. The sale by Sotheby’s and Pierre Bergé & Associés features a collection of works chosen by Pierre Bergé, many of which were acquired with Yves Saint Laurent. In the homes he created with Yves Saint Laurent, Bergé surrounded himself with art and decorative objects: four interiors, each with its own identity. On offer is property from the Paris townhouse at Rue Bonaparte, La Datcha on the estate of Chateau Gabriel in Normandy, Mas Theo in St. Remy and Villa Mabrouka in Tangiers.
Pierre Bergé was a committed philanthropist and wanted a portion of the proceeds from this auction and from the sale of other items to benefit the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent in Paris and the Fondation Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech. Here is a small selection:
UPDATE: THE TWO DAY SALE REALISED 27,474,328 WITH 100% OF LOTS SOLD AND 95% EXCEEDING THE HIGH ESTIMATE.
An Imperial 18th century ‘Yangcai’ Famille-Rose porcelain vase sold for 16.2 million at Sotheby’s in Paris today. This was a new record for any Chinese porcelain sold in France. This lost treasure of Imperial China was found in an attic and brought in to Sotheby’s in a shoebox after having been discovered by chance in the attic of a French family home.
The vase is of exceptional rarity: the only known example of its kind, it was produced by the Jingdezhen workshops for the magnificent courts of the Qianlong Emperor (1735-1796). Famille Rose porcelains of the period (or ‘yangcai’ porcelains, as they are known) are extremely rare on the market, with most examples currently housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei and other museums around the world.
These so-called yangcai porcelain commissions were the very epitome of the ware produced by the Jingdezhen imperial kilns. They were made as one-of-a-kind items, sometimes in pairs, but never in large quantities. This technique combined a new colour palette with Western-style compositions. Beyond their superior quality, yangcai enamels were intended to create the most opulent and luxurious effect possible. Only one other similar vase, although with slightly different subject matter and decorative borders, now in the Guimet museum in Paris, is known.
Left to the grandparents of the present owners by an uncle, the vase is listed among the contents of the latter’s Paris apartment after his death in 1947. It is recorded alongside several other Chinese and Japanese objects including other Chinese porcelains, two dragon robes, a yellow silk textile, and an unusual bronze mirror contained in a carved lacquer box. While the exact provenance of the vase and the other Chinese and Japanese pieces before 1947 cannot be traced, the receipt of a Satsuma censer acquired as a wedding gift in the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris by an ancestor of the family suggests an active interest in Asian art at a very early date. Similarly, this vase may well have been acquired in Paris in the late 19th century when the arrival of Asian works of art initiated a fashion for Japanese and Chinese art