Ireland's best
Susan Moore on how collectors of Irish art have become more discriminating Will it last? It is the question asked every year as the annual Irish auctions loom large in the London salerooms. Ever since Sotheby's had the inspired idea seven years ago of selling the cream of the crop in London rather than Dublin and Belfast — and taking the best of it on whistlestop tours of the shamrock heartlands of Atnerica as well as to Ireland — this once provincial market has boomed — along with the Irish economy. Records have fallen like ninepins — and, crucially, each sale has brought in new blood.
In 1998 at Christie's, Sir John Lavery became the first Irish artist to pass the il million post — and Jack Butler Yeats, Louis le Brocquy and •Sir William Orpen followed hard on his heels. Last year, an Irish-American collector, underbid by an Irish-Canadian, paid a phenomenal £1.98 million for one of Orpen's portraits of Gardenia St George, the daughter of his muse and mistress — the highest price ever paid for any Irish picture at auction.
The Irish — wherever they live — have become passionate about their art which, at long last, is receiving the kind of international recognition previously only accorded to her literary lions. Perhaps W.B. Yeats was right after all to predict that he would be remembered as the poet brother of the painter. In the last decade or so. national confidence at home has expressed itself in the building of an Irish Museum of Modern Art, the installation of the Francis Bacon studio in the Hugh Lane Gallery and, earlier this year, in the opening of a new wing at the National Gallery of Ireland — and the acquisition of its first work by a living artist, Louis le Brocquy (a gift which cost Dublin businessman Lochlann Quinn £1.7 million). Dublin and Belfast have established themselves as the pre-eminent marketplace for Irish contemporary art. As for the rest, everyone is craving spoonfuls of this seemingly ever-rising soufflé.
As this column goes to press, Waddington's in Toronto is staging its first ever auction of Irish art, presumably sourced from all those émigré Northern Protestants whose children have now hung up the sash and sold to those sentimentalists who yearn for a piece of the old sod. Last week in London, the salerooms presented their largest Irish sales ever (and their heaviest estimates yet), with Sotheby's offering 285 lots in Bond Street — plus a sale of Irish ceramics, silver and glass at Olympia — and Christie's some 338 pictures at King Street and South Kensington. Works flew in from as far afield as Mexico and Melbourne.
Unsurprisingly, last year's results produced a flurry of Orpens. consigned by owners with varying degrees of extravagant expectation. Most impressive was Sotheby's 'Interior at Clonsilla with Mrs St George', a luxuriant image of his mistress reclining against the deep cushions of the chaise longue in her extraordinary, half-lit bedroom (the room in which she entertained most of her visitors, as well as Mr Orpen). It is a trophy picture, and what could be called a gentleman's picture, offered with an estimate of £800,000-£1 .2 million. Just one person wanted it — or was prepared to swallow the asking price — and it sold on one bid for £886,650 with premium. And that, I am afraid to say, was the highlight of a sale — or should I say bloodbath? — which saw just half the lots find new owners and raised £4 million instead of the anticipated £6-£9 million.
What went wrong? Can Sotheby's lay blame at the feet of the Celtic Tiger which is showing signs of slowing down, or of Bertie Ahern who most thoughtlessly called a general election for the day after its sale and the day of Christie's? Or was it simply that some of the major players in the Irish market had their thoughts elsewhere? More likely the problem was the sale itself which boasted big names aplenty but offered too many second-division pictures at first-division prices. Matters were not improved by its opening run of dreary pictures which no one wanted — it was so dire that 20 minutes in a lady in the fourth row nodded off — or by the 43 lots of illustrated Orpen letters to the St George family which, although charming and whimsical and quite well received, killed the sale dead. Hardly anyone bid on the telephone. By some accounts, the absurdly high estimates caused a certain amount of resentment among Irish collectors who do not care to be treated as fools.
Christie's fared much better, partly because its estimates were saner — Sotheby's debacle also prompted a ring-around to get reserve prices lowered (Yeats's 'On the Way to the Sea' of 1948, for instance, sold for £644,650 — its unpublished presale estimate was around £800,000). But there was also some good, fresh early material. A rare, Claudian early-18th century view of Dublin, for instance, by one Joseph Tudor, tripled expectations to sell for £468,650; an album of 67 figure drawings of the 'Cries of Dublin' by Hugh Douglas Hamilton fetched almost five times its estimate. Works that were estimated ridiculously high — like the cover-lot Orpen of Howth Head said to fetch £1-£1.5
and the decorative Leech of aloes (estimate a hefty £400,000-£500,000) — similarly failed to elicit a single bid. Christie's
combined auctions sold 76 per cent by lot, 57 per cent by value, and even here raised significantly less than their pre-sale estimates.
No doubt some will say that the Irish art bubble has burst, but the truth is more that collectors have just become more discriminating — and that Irish art, like virtually every other market, is seeing a growing disparity of price between the best and the rest. Records are still being made at auction for good pictures — this year there were a half dozen or so, among them Paul Henry's Whistlerian 'The Lobster Fisher' at Christie's which fetched £298,150 — and Sir John Lavery continues to prove himself a market darling, both sides of the Atlantic. Significant private sales are still being made, too. The problem is just that very good Irish pictures fresh to the market are becoming harder and harder to find.
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