February 21 saw James Adam of Dublin band together with Glendining (Bonhams) (17.5% + VAT buyer’s premium) to offer Irish Coins, medals and bank notes. The sale took place in Dublin and was denoted in euros. For months they had been searching out goods and we may assume that there is very little left around which was not in this sale.
As useful a catalogue as this will become, I did hear a lot of carping about it. It seems that the compilers do not fully understand the computer or fail to understand the necessity of illustrating lots real-size or a round multiple thereof. Many items were illustrated at, for example, times 1.05, or perhaps at 90-odd per cent size, and there was no consistency. This made the catalogue very difficult and irritating to interpret – and interpret is the right word. Other firms seem to get this aspect right, so it cannot be all that taxing a task. It is just a pity to spoil such a rare type of catalogue. On the positive side, it is worth reporting that about 75 per cent of the lots found new homes, which is good in a sale such as this one. At the time of writing, no sold total is available.
The highest price of the day was the €3800 (£2530) paid for what must be one of the finest existing portrait shillings of Queen Mary (1553), which was estimated perversely at £1800-2000. The illustration was an unspecified around half size in the catalogue.
More photogenic, and illustrated right, was the Northern Banking Company 1867 £1 note. Estimated at £250-300 it made €320 (£213).
What is generally interesting is that this sale, when compared to the 2000 sale, demonstrates just how rare and interesting Irish material is. For this reason alone this catalogue is worth preserving.
Why size is everything
Specialist sales of Irish material are so few and far between that they are worth enumerating. The celebrated Lockett collec-tion was sold at Glendinings in 1956 and Whytes of Dublin held a landmark sale in April 2000.
