Ireland

Prices at auction for works by Basil Blackshaw have been slowly creeping up over the past few years and Northern Ireland’s most famous living artist now enjoys international acclaim.

IRELAND: IRISH pictures for many years flew off the rostrum with both a strong private market in Ireland and the money of Irish-Americans to fuel the enthusiasm. Irish art still, of course, sells, but there is no doubt that collectors are becoming more selective.

THE word from Ireland is that autumn could be hard work – judging by results at the antiques fair staged as part of the Royal Dublin Society Horse Show from August 6 to 10. The Horse Show is a prime event in the city’s social calendar and the idea of the antiques fair – organised in the past by veteran Irish promoter Louis O’ Sullivan but this year by the RDS itself – is to put the 25 exhibitors in a potentially profitable ambience.

£36,000 private bid on cabinet shows underlying market strength: BRITISH auctioneers have long looked enviously across the Irish Sea where there still seems a wealth of high-quality furniture coming onto the market from private sources to be welcomed not merely by the trade but also by confident and well-heeled private bidders who have been the dominant force these past ten years and more.

THE London Irish sales are the annual litmus test of the very top end of the Irish picture market. Upcoming at the time of writing, this year’s sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s (May 15 and 16) seem to lack the numbers of big hitting pictures seen over the past ten years, reflecting the reluctance of vendors to come into today’s nervous market in which estimates are based upon realities rather than the wishful thinking that used to be good enough.

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.

Direct competitors to Bonhams Honiton, in an area of the South West that is hardly brimming with quality goods, auctioneer Richard Connor and his team nevertheless put together a respectable offering of brown furniture and paintings at the Honiton Galleries, where the one item of rarity among the silver was this Irish dish ring of above average quality by Edmond Johnson, Dublin 1863, measuring 8in (20cm) diameter, which attracted an above-estimate bid of £2200.

The importance of clear due diligence in dealings has been highlighted by an Irish court overruling the country’s statute of limitations on stolen goods in a civil case.

A set of paintings, including two by Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, have been stolen from a country house in Ireland that has now been targeted four times by thieves, police said.

IRELAND’S top antiques fair will be held in Dublin next week when from September 26 to 29 some 45 dealers stand at the 37th annual Irish Antique Dealers Fair in the Main Hall of the Royal Dublin Society, Ballsbridge.

There is to be a major sale of Irish coins and medals in Dublin next year, on Friday, February 21, at the time of the Dublin International Coin Fair. This is being jointly hosted by James Adam of Dublin and Bonhams under their alias Glendining’s.

ANTHONY Molloy worked as a wildlife ranger for Ireland’s national heritage service, Duchas. When he retired a few years ago, at 65, his farewell gift was not the traditional watch, but a metal detector.

GOOD house contents sales, now a rarity in Britain, still crop up in Ireland and although the latest was a reversal of the usual reason for such events – the owners were actually moving back into the house rather than leaving it – Lissadell in Co. Sligo followed the familiar pattern of widespread general interest in pieces from ‘the big house’ and enthusiasm among people wishing to buy fresh-to- market pieces.

IRISH auctioneers have long been adamant that Irish pictures sell better in Ireland and certainly the 71 per cent sold by lot achieved at James Adam (15% buyer’s premium) in Dublin on May 29 was only just shy of the 76 per cent by lot selling rate taken at Christie’s Irish sale in London on May 17.

THE National Library of Ireland has acquired a sprawling collection of manuscripts by James Joyce, which remained hidden for nearly 60 years after being concealed from the Nazis.They include a total of some 700 pages in six notebooks, 16 drafts from Ulysses and typescripts and proofs of Finnegans Wake.

MAJOR players from the English and Continental clock trade travelled to Dublin on May 1 for the sale of this important and rare 19th century ormolu-cased French automaton clock, right, at O’Reilly’s (15% buyer’s premium).

Jewellery and silver enthusiasts were catered for in Ireland as well as Wiltshire during April as private buyers flocked to O’Reilly’s (15 per cent buyer’s premium) sale of gemstones and silver in Dublin on April 10.

ONE of the most important oils by Irish artist Louis le Brocquy (b.1916) is to return to Ireland after spending nearly 50 years in Italy.

The more collectable the antique, the greater difference small details make to the final price. This general rule may explain the contrasting prices on these two glass bowls, all but identical in date, c.1800, form and origin, Cork or Waterford.

Dublin auctioneer John de Vere White is to sell 25 paintings on behalf of Aer Lingus, the national airline of the Republic of Ireland, on November 20.