While not surprisingly furniture features in next Tuesday's house contents sale to be conducted by Mealy's in Co Cork, there will be a particular focus on Irish art during the event. The Hermitage in Cobh has been home to Mr and Mrs C.E. Hall, whose large collection of paintings built up over a 30-year period, is included in the auction.
Many of the names featured will be familiar: James Humbert Craig, Frank Egginton, Maurice Canning Wilks, Dermod O'Brien and Charles Vincent Lamb. However, in addition, the sale includes a number of women painters, not all of equal renown, since Ireland, in common with many other countries, has tended to pay more attention to its male than female artists.
There are, for example, two lots from Mary Swanzy (numbers 118 and 222) - an oil still life (estimate £2,000-£3,000) and a pair of quick pencil drawings (£300-£400) - as well as a Rose Barton watercolour (lot 127, The Tenters House, estimate £700-£1,100). But many of the other women artists featured enjoy posthumous reputations more modest than their talents. Typical in this respect is lot 476, an oil called West of Ireland - Woman on a Hill by Dorothy Isobel Blackham. A Dubliner who only died in 1975, she regularly exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy for 30 years from 1916 onwards and produced woodcuts for the Yeats sisters' Cuala Press. Linocuts were another speciality of this artist. West of Ireland might almost be a self-portrait, showing a woman sitting with her back to the viewer but looking down on a group of cottages.
Another very fine Irish woman artist included in the Mealy's sale is landscape painter Gladys Wynne, born in 1876. Daughter of a Church of Ireland rector, she spent much of her life in Co Wicklow, which was a favourite subject for her watercolours. Lot 480 (£400-£600), however, shows the bandstand in St Stephen's Green, Dublin, looking beyond over the trees to the roofline of buildings, including the Shelbourne Hotel.
Mary Duncan, although born in England, moved to this country around 1910 and exhibited at the RHA for the next 40 years. A friend of Estella Solomons, she painted both portraits and landscapes, although the oil being sold next week, lot 488, shows a Breton Woman peeling Vegetables. This is a rather dark impressionistic picture, depicting the interior of a cottage with the aforementioned woman on the left and a sunlit exterior beyond; it is expected to make £1,400-£1,600.
There are two oils (lots 106 and 255) by the late Dolly Robinson, mother-in-law of former president Mary Robinson; one of these shows a drawingroom interior (£400-£600), the other a parkland scene (£300-£400). And two other Irish women artists are represented in the sale by three paintings each. Sylvia Cooke-Collis (lots 252, 492 and 493) was born in Cork in 1900 and studied for a time with Mainie Jellett in Dublin. Landscapes and port scenes appear to have been her forte and it is by these subjects that she is represented in next week's sale. The cubist angularity of Jellett is softened in her case and given a certain fauvist charm, aided by the choice of subject matter and figurative rather than abstract style. Estimates for her work here run from £300 to £700.
The other Irish woman artist with three pictures in the sale also has Cork associations; Kate Dobbin's husband, Sir Alfred Graham Dobbin, owned the city's Imperial Hotel, where the couple lived after their own home was burnt down in the 1920s. Lady Dobbin was a regular exhibitor at the RHA from 1894 until 1947; she died in 1955. Two of the lots on offer (484 and 496) are charming, uncomplicated watercolour studies of flowers in jugs. Such work was a constant feature throughout her career and these examples both have estimates of £400-£600 each. The third item, lot 487 - again a watercolour - shows Patrick's Bridge and Shandon seen across the River Lee in Cork, with figures scurrying by in the rain (£600-£900).
While viewing of all these pictures will be on the premises of the Hermitage, the Mealy's sale at which they will offered is to be conducted at Cobh's Commodore Hotel from 10.30 a.m.
