THE PAINTS and brushes used by Jack B Yeats, Ireland’s best-known modern artist, have come to light and will be auctioned in Dublin later this month.
Fine art auctioneers Whyte’s said the hoard – valued at €20,000 to €30,000 – had been found in the Dalkey home of his niece, the late Anne Yeats, who was also an artist.
She had inherited most of her uncle’s estate and, in 1997, donated many of his paintings and archival material to the National Gallery of Ireland. However, she retained his paints, paint boxes, palettes, brushes, palette knives and various paper ephemera.
Following her death in 2001, the contents of her house were auctioned but these items were somehow overlooked because they were not at the time considered valuable enough to auction. They were later sold to a house clearance dealer. He, in turn, sold them on for a sum believed to be a few hundred euro.
Auctioneer Ian Whyte said: “This is the most exciting find since the Bacon studio. Jack Yeats is Ireland’s greatest painter of the 20th century and to find the materials and tools with which he created his masterpieces is very exciting”.
The London studio of the late Irish-born artist Francis Bacon was donated by his heirs to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin where it has been “reassembled”.
Mr Whyte said the collection of Yeats’s items would be sold as one lot in an auction at the RDS in Ballsbridge on May 30th.
Dr Róisín Kennedy, an expert on the artist and former curator of the Yeats collection and archive in the National Gallery of Ireland, said: “As Yeats was almost secretive about his working methods, these items provide an intriguing insight into the very private world of his studio”.
The assortment includes paint made by his favourite supplier, Winsor and Newton, a renowned supplier of artists’ materials based in Harrow, north London.
The lot also features one of Yeats’s address books listing close friends and contacts such as Pádraic and Mary Colum in New York; Patrick Kavanagh; and the English artist John Piper.
Other papers include a chequebook, covering the period from late 1945 to 1947, which reveals details about the artist’s domestic spending; medical prescriptions issued at Portobello House in 1957, the nursing home where he spent his final years; and a quantity of blank Christmas and New Year cards, designed and privately printed by Yeats in the early 1950s.
Yeats, who died in 1957, is one of the most popular and expensive Irish artists.
The highest price paid for one of his paintings was achieved in 1999 when Sotheby's in London sold The Wild Ones for just over £1.2 million. Many of his paintings are in public collections including The Liffey Swimin the National Gallery of Ireland.
