Enthusiastic bidding among private collectors and dealers in London yesterday afternoon saw paintings by the late Derek Hill sell for up to 10 times their expected price.
The group of 50-odd works came from the Co Donegal studio of Hill who died last July and were included in an auction of Irish art at Christie's. During the morning session, the London-based dealer Simon Dickinson paid £1,103,750 for an oil painting by Jack B. Yeats. The picture, The Whistle of a Jacket, had been expected to fetch the highest price at yesterday's sale of Irish art held by Christie's in London.
In the Hill collection, the highest figure fetched was £23,500 sterling for a view of Prof R.B. McDowell walking in the grounds of Trinity College Dublin; this had been expected to make no more than £3,000. An oil of a string quartet playing in Florence sold for £10,575 and £8,225 was paid for a prospect of London's Wapping docks.
Although yesterday's was not the highest price paid at auction for a work by Yeats, the figure confirms the artist's continuing popularity among collectors.
In May 1999, Sotheby's sold Yeats's The Wild Ones for £1,233,500, and a year ago the same auction house got £938,500 for his The Women of the West.
Sotheby's holds its own sale of Irish art today, featuring no fewer than a dozen works by Jack Yeats, but even the finest of these is not expected to fetch more than £300,000. Nonetheless, it is a reflection of the painter's dominant position in Irish art that £168,750, the second-highest price reached at Christie's sale yesterday, was paid by a private British collector for another Yeats picture, Moore's Melodies. Although The Whistle of a Jacket, a relatively late work by Yeats, failed to set a new record at auction, two other paintings sold by Christie's did so for their respective artists. Nathaniel Hone's Boating on the River, which had been expected to sell for no more than £15,000, went for £80,750.
The previous best price for this artist at auction was set no fewer than 11 years ago when £38,000 was paid for Fishing Boats in Dublin Bay at the James Adam salesrooms.
And Norah McGuinness's Bird on the Mountain, with a pre-sale estimate of £10,000-£15,000, almost doubled the upper figure to reach £28,200.