Paintings from Hugh Lane Gallery and Hunt Museum to be auctioned

Paintings worth more than €1 million that have been on loan to Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery and Limerick’s Hunt Museum have been taken off public display and shipped to London to be sold at auction.

The paintings – by leading Irish artists Sir John Lavery, Jack B Yeats, Sir William Orpen and Walter Frederick Osborne – are owned by an unnamed family who acquired them in the late 1990s in London.

The family, who wish to remain anonymous, then loaned the paintings to the galleries.

But they have now decided to sell the paintings which have been removed from both galleries and sent to London after the National Gallery of Ireland issued the relevant export licences to Sotheby's. The paintings had been on loan for more than 15 years.

Sotheby’s, as is customary, did not name the family nor would they say whether they are Irish, or even resident in Ireland.

If the family is tax-resident in Ireland, profits accrued from the sale of the paintings will not be subject to Irish Capital Acquisitions Tax because the Revenue Commissioners grants tax relief in return for loaning art to museums and galleries.

The paintings are among the star lots in the biggest auction of Irish art since the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. The Irish Sale at Sotheby’s, in London’s New Bond Street – traditionally a key event in the art market calendar – was suspended during the recession, but has now been reinstated because, Sotheby’s said, “demand from collectors of Irish art from outside Ireland has increased”.

Top lot

The top lot,

Japanese Winter

, by Sir John Lavery, which depicts his wife Hazel, Lady Lavery and step-daughter Alice, in the Swiss Alps in 1912, has a top estimate of £500,000 (€685,000). The painting was bought by the current owner at Sotheby’s in 1996 when it sold for £150,000 and has been on loan ever since to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. It is believed that Lavery named the painting because he thought the snow scene was “Japanese in character”.

The Talkers, a 1951 painting by Jack B Yeats, depicting a crowded interior where a party is going on, has a top estimate of £250,000. It was offered at Sotheby's in 1998 with a top estimate of £150,000 but failed to sell in the auction and was bought privately afterwards for an undisclosed sum and then loaned to the Hugh Lane.

Hastings Railway Station, by Walter Frederick Osborne, dating from circa 1890, was acquired by the family from a commercial art gallery in London in 1997 for an undisclosed sum and then loaned to the Hugh Lane. It has a top estimate of £100,000.

Howth

View from Howth

, by Sir William Orpen, a painting dating from 1912 during the artist’s annual holiday at Howth Head, has a top estimate of £120,000. It was acquired by the owner in 1997 at the Pyms Gallery in London for an undisclosed sum and then loaned to the Hunt Museum in Limerick.

The Irish public will get one final chance to see the paintings.

Sotheby’s said that all four paintings – along with others in the Irish Sale – would be returned briefly to Ireland for a pre-auction viewing exhibition at the RHA Gallery in Dublin for three days (October 8th-10th) before returning to London for the auction on October 21st.