Private art collection sells for €2.5m
Part of a rediscovered private art collection including unseen paintings by Jack B Yeats and Louis le Brocquy was tonight sold for €2.5m – a million euro over its pre-sale estimate.
Owned by the late Cork obstetrician Dr JB Kearney, the Dublin auction included both paintings and sculptures by Irish artists hidden away for 30 years.
The top selling lot was ’The Turf Gatherer’ by Paul Henry, which sold for €300,000 and is thought to be a new Irish record for the Ulster artist.
It sold to an anonymous private bidder in the saleroom for over double its estimate.
The Kearney collection, known about by only a handful of people, was just recently brought into the public domain thanks to Adam’s public exhibition previews in Cork, London, Dublin and this evening’s auction.
James O’Halloran, Adam’s Managing Director, said: “This collection of highly valuable Irish art has exceeded all expectations this evening reaching a soaring total and achieving new Irish records for a number of superb Irish artists.
“Many of the buyers for Dr Kearney’s collection this evening were private Irish collectors, which is a good indication that the majority of the paintings and sculpture will remain in the country and bring much pleasure to an even larger number of private individuals, which is what the family believed Dr Kearney would have wanted,” he said.
The 69 lots catalogued as Part One of the Kearney Collection which included some of the most seminal Irish artworks of the 20th century had a pre-sale estimate close to €1.5m.
Other top results from the auction included €210,000 for ’A Tinker’s Child’ and €190,000 for ’The Sky from the Train’, both by Yeats.
Le Brocquy’s ’Torso’ secured €120,000.
Post-war artists from the North also exceeded expectations with Gerard Dillon’s aerial landscape of ’Inishlaken’ selling for an Irish record of €185,000 and Colin Middleton’s ’Edge of the Fields’ fetching €110,000.
Dr Kearney was an active patron of the arts in his lifetime, quietly collecting contemporary Irish and international art over the years.
He provided financial support to a number of up-and-coming artists, many of whom he knew personally.
He was a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, past president of the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland and on the organising committee for the Cork ROSC exhibitions.
Aside from the artwork consigned from the Kearney collection, additional highlights from Adam’s Important Irish Art Sale also included Le Brocquy’s ’Fantail Pigeon’ which sold for €310,000, Yeats’ ’Public Letter Writer’, which fetched €280,000 and the striking ’Connemara Mountains’ by Henry, which sold for €170,000.
Part Two of the collection, which comprises a further 70 lots of paintings and sculpture, will be sold in Adam’s Contemporary and Modern Art Sale next Tuesday.
It will include work by internationally acclaimed artists such as Pablo Picasso, David Hockney and Patrick Heron.
