The catalogue for De Vere’s Irish art auction on Tuesday week shows the range and diversity of the Irish art world as it shows Irish artists at work both at home and abroad.
Within Ireland, the artists’ gaze ranges from the domestic – Mildred Anne Butler chronicling the changing seasons in the garden at her home in Kilmurry, Co Kilkenny (Lot 54, €1,500–€2,500) – to the social, in Nano Reid’s portrait of card players in the pub (Lot 12, €12,000–€18,000) and the political, in Sean Hillen’s photographic record of life in the Bogside in Derry at the height of the Troubles (Lot 104, €800–€1,200).
Further afield, we find William John Leech observing fishing boats at work in Brittany (Lot 8, €7,000–€10,000), Letitia Marion Hamilton rendering the effect of sunlight on Dubrovnik’s city walls (Lot 58, €4,000–€6,000) and Tony O’Malley conjuring up the sound and feel of winter on the island of Lanzarote (Lot 15, €14,000–€18,000).
As Francis Ruane writes of O'Malley's large–scale Island Light, (Lot 15, €14,000–18,000), "the vertical blue-green panels flow like fast running water over the surface, while thin lines seem to blow like grass in the wind".
On the macroscopic scale, O'Malley can also find poetry in the texture and colour of a Pond in Spring (Lot 16, €20,000–€30,000).
Yet another international dimension to the sale comes from the inclusion of 24 works from the collection of Sean and Rosemarie Mulcahy, who were well known on the Dublin arts scene for many years. Rosemarie was an expert on Spanish art; many of the paintings, such as Miquel Barcelo's Bujie (Lot 64, €30,000–€50,000) and Patrick Swift's Tulips (Lot 62, €4,000–€6,000) come from the couple's Leeson Park home.
The sale is well supplied with memorable portraits, led by Roderic O'Conor's quiet, focussed study, Breton Girl Reading (Lot 48, €50,000–€70,000), a work of such quality that it could easily have hung in the recent O'Conor show at the National Gallery of Ireland.
Engrossed in her book, the subject of O'Conor's painting doesn't engage with the viewer – unlike the dashing first World War pilot John Lett, who watches us from William Orpen's portrait (Lot 49, €20,000–€30,000) with a haunted expression which seems to foretell the young airman's shocking death at the age of 21.
The biggest–selling names on the current Irish art scene are represented in the auction with two Aubusson tapestries by Louis le Brocquy (Lot 26, Allegory, €50,000–€70,000 and Lot 27, Cuchulainn VII, €40,000–€60,000).
Paul Henry declared that Achill called to him as no other place ever had done, and his seascape The Breaking Wave (Lot 51, €30,000–€50,000) is full of drama and movement.
There's drama of a more human variety in Jack B Yeats's The Public Letter Writer (Lot 50, €250,000–€350,000), which was inspired by the painter's encounter with a man writing letters for illiterate people on the streets of New York in 1904.
The art of the abstract is seen in a range of moods and phases. Mary Swanzy's gentle Cubist Landscape (Lot 5, €8,000–€12,000) is one of her later and more lyrical works; William Scott's enigmatic Untitled 1959 (Lot 20, €25,000–€35,000) is one of a series of canvasses which marks his move towards complete abstraction.
Hughie O'Donoghue lived and worked in Co Kerry for many years, but his brooding, volatile Anzio, The Overpass III (Lot 21, €20,000–€30,000) conveys the brutal landscape of the second World War.
William Crozier's brightly–coloured The Road to the Strand (Lot 22, €20,000–€30,000), meanwhile, recreates the much–loved surroundings of his studio in Skibbereen.
Among the canvases which depict Irish people at work and play are Gerard Dillon's vertiginous The Village Church (Lot 46, €15,000–€24,000) an early work whose subject has been identified as St Joseph's Church, known today as Hannahstown Parish, outside Belfast.
Letitia Marion Hamilton brings us inside the vibrant hubbub of The Ward Union Point to Point (Lot 9, €14,000–€18,000); and Robert Ballagh's witty Woman Looking At A Mark Rothko (Lot 17, €10,000–€15,000) does exactly what it says in the title.
As for Patrick Collins's Island, (Lot 39, €2,000–€4,000), well, it's a small island inside whose boundaries contain – barely – a multitude of contrasting shapes, textures, colours and forms. Sound familiar?
De Vere's Irish Art Auction, The Royal College of Physicians, Kildare Street, Dublin 2, Tuesday November 20th, 6pm. See deveres.ie
