A SET OF FIVE recently discovered sketches by Jack B Yeats made £22,500 (€25,493) at a Christie’s art auction in London last Wednesday.

The watercolour images of horse-racing were found hidden behind a Victorian print in a rotten frame which was about to be thrown on a skip during a house clearance in the south of England. Christie’s had estimated their value at between £20,000 and £30,000.

The sketches, collectively known as And Then He Wonwere bought by an unnamed bidder in the saleroom.

The fine art auctioneers said they were among the first examples of the artist’s drawings in colour and probably date from 1897. Yeats was living and working in England at that time. He later returned to Ireland and died in a Dublin nursing home in 1957. Christie’s said the man who had found the sketches when the frame “came apart in his hands” was “gobsmacked and stunned” when told of their value.

Also in the sale, a painting titled In Galway by Walter Frederick Osborne sold for £20,000 (€22,662.66), they had an estimate of £7,000-£10,000; while Mildred Anne Butler's My Garden: The Gate From The Herbaceous Garden,Kilmurry, County Kilkenny made £8,125 (€9,206), they were estimated at £6,000-£10,000.