Hone, Jellett and Henry: Irish art in focus at this week’s sales

With the National Gallery’s An Túr Gloine exhibition opening next weekend, and plans for a museum on Parnell Square dedicated to stained glass master Harry Clarke in train, stained glass is shining bright. Founded in 1903 by Sarah Purser, pioneering artists at An Túr Gloine include Wilhelmina Geddes, Catherine O’Brien, Alfred E Child, Hubert McGoldrick, Evie Hone and Michael Healy – who was the subject of an excellent book by David Caron, published last year (Four Courts Press).

Dublin-born, Evie Hone studied with Walter Sickert in London, where she met Mainie Jellett, before the pair went on to Paris. There, André Lhote and Albert Gleizes would influence them to become early pioneers of cubism in Ireland. One of Hone’s most significant commissions was for the east window of the chapel at Eton College, but if you’re not planning to educate your sons among the upper classes, you can also see her work in St Patrick’s Church at the visitor centre on the Hill of Tara in Co Meath. Entitled The Descent of the Holy Spirit, it was commissioned in 1936. A beautiful preparatory watercolour sketch for the window is now for sale at Adam’s Important Irish Art Sale, closing on March 27th (€3,000-€5,000).

Also in the Adam’s sale is Wooded River Landscape with Waterfall and Ruin (€6,000-€10,000), by the intriguing artist, Thomas Sautelle Roberts, who was born Sautelle Roberts. His older brother was the Co Waterford-born Thomas Roberts, who had established a reputation as one of the finest landscape painters in Britain and Ireland, when he died, tragically young, from tuberculosis in 1778. Either in homage or in hope, the younger Sautelle added “Thomas” to his own name, gave up architecture and took to art full time. It – and his evident talent – paid off, and he was to become one of the first members of the RHA, when it was founded in 1823.

Once the staple of drawingrooms everywhere, 18th-century landscape painting has more recently fallen out of favour, but fashion doesn’t diminish the epic nature of its impact, or its ability to transport you into sublime and idealised rural worlds. In the right context, it can also transmit depth and imply the longevity of your good taste. For this reason, canny collectors may relish the work by Roberts-the-younger, when it comes for sale, alongside more by near-contemporaries, such as John Henry Campbell with his View of Lough Erne, with Devenish Island and Round Tower (€3,000-€5,000); and James Arthur O’Connor with three works on offer, including Mountain River Landscape with Figures “Near Waterford” (€6,000-€8,000).

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With such a wealth of sites to inspire, Irish artists have excelled at landscape painting, and it is fascinating to see the styles of its execution shift over the eras. At Adam’s, examples include a remarkable Paul Henry from 1911. Far more muted than his classic bluey-hued west of Ireland lakes, mountains and cottages, The Bog (€60,000-€80,000) was almost certainly set in Achill, which Henry had visited for the first time the previous year. Go forward another half-century for Patrick Collins, who was coincidentally born the same year Henry’s The Bog was painted. His Spring Morning (€30,000-€50,000) brings the elements to a purer distilled sense of the senses themselves.

Works by Evie Hone’s contemporary and close friend, Mainie Jellett, feature in the deVeres’ Irish Art Auction, with bidding closing on March 26th. The series of works on paper come from the collection of journalist, critic and author Bruce Arnold, who has published books on Jellett, and on modernism in Ireland. Abstract Composition (Blue) (€3,500-€5,000) has an immediate and light looseness that reveals the playfulness that underlies her more rigorously polished works, while her pencil Abstract Composition (Crucifixion) (€1,500-€2,500), shows the intensity of structure that underpinned everything she did in this phase of her work. Jellett went to Paris in 1921, and Studio Interior with Seated Nude (€700-€1,000) by her, signed and dated 1918, shows the formal skill and delicacy of line that she was only too keen to convert into the abstract modernism that would make her name.

Patrick Collins appears in the deVeres sale too, and his Menhirs on the Plain (€10,000-€15,000) has a delicious timelessness, where the unapologetic abstraction seems somehow eternal. Letitia Hamilton’s Wind Blown Tree Killary (€4,000-€6,000) is almost insubordinate in how it barely contains its wildness under a veneer of formal landscape language. And an even lusher take on the land, comes from Sean McSweeney’s Conway’s Bog (€3,000-€5,000), where you could almost get lost in the reeds and waters the work so richly evokes.

The next Sotheby’s Irish Art Sale will be on view in Paris from April 26th to 30th, before closing online on May 2nd, but you can view highlights in Sotheby’s Dublin at Molesworth Street from March 26th to 28th. These highlights include William Leech, A Shining Palace (€40,000-€60,000); Louis le Brocquy, Image of Samuel Beckett (€40,000-€60,000); Barrie Cooke, Summer Knot Study, (€4,000-€6,000); and Melissa O’Donnell, Parterre of Renewal (€6,000-€10,000).

An Túr Gloine runs from March 30th to January 12th 2025 at the National Gallery, and admission is free. adams.ie; deveres.ie; sothebys.com; nationalgallery.ie;

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