It was a case of standing room only at the Important Irish Art auction in Dublin last night as fiercely contested bidding saw records tumble during what proved to be the highest grossing auction of fine art in Ireland.
The auction saw 176 works of art go under the hammer at the James Adam & Sons premises on St Stephen's Green, with the final sale total, minus fees, reaching just under €6 million. This is well over the previous record total sale for an Irish auction of €3.75 million.
The most keenly anticipated sale of the evening was Dublin artist Louis le Brocquy's 1946 oil painting Sick Tinker Child that, after competitive bidding from both inside the room and over the phone, eventually sold for €820,000 not including fees, a record Irish auction price for one of his paintings.
Le Brocquy (90) is a self-taught artist whose works have won awards in Ireland and abroad. Two more of his oil paintings, Image of WB Yeats and Fantail Pigeons, sold for €310,000 and €280,000 respectively yesterday.
Another much-awaited sale was that of Ulster artist Paul Henry's Dooega Achill Island, Co Mayo, which sold for €220,000, four times its estimated value. The oil painting, depicting the rugged landscape of the island, had been with the previous owner's family since the 1920s and was only valued at a BBC Antiques Roadshow in Buckinghamshire, England during the summer.
The painting was described by the BBC's Mark Poltimore as one of the most exciting pictures he had ever seen on a roadshow. It was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder last night. Two more of Henry's paintings featuring Achill Island sold for €160,000 and €97,000 during the auction.
With many of the works selling above their guide price, James O'Halloran, managing director of Adam's, had his work cut out to keep up with the bidding from the floor. Roderic O'Conor's 1898 work, Sur la Cote, Finistère, sold for €500,000, while 12 works by Norah McGuiness fetched in the region of €400,000. Jack Butler Yeats's Man in a Train Thinking sold for €295,000, while Walter Osborne's A Gray Morning in a Breton Farmyard was bought for €290,000.
Abstract Composition by Mainie Jellett fetched €92,000, while Mary Swanzy's In the Window sold for €100,000, which was four times the estimated value. Among other works that proved popular were paintings by Tony O'Malley, Peter Curling, Robert Ballagh, Donald Teskey, Gerard Dillon, Kenneth Webb and Frank McKelvey.