"The Table in the Blue Room" by Gerard Dillon, sold for €100,000 at Morgan O'Driscoll, October 2024
The phrase ‘Steady as she goes’ best characterises the Irish art market in 2024, although there are several substantial auctions coming up in December that may add some lustre to the solid but unexciting prices achieved so far.
Thinker by Barry Flanagan, achieved €1,256,000 at Christie’s in October 2024
Skibbereen-based auctioneer Morgan O’Driscoll described 2024 as “a good year overall in terms of volume, but not spectacular.” The post-Covid splurge is well over and there are no record prices to report at the upper end of the market. Figurative art dominates, aside from that outlier Sean Scully. Abstract artists with solid reputations such as Felim Egan and John Noel-Smith are selling for well below their gallery prices. A number of the best prices were achieved abroad – further confirmation that the market for Irish art is no longer as parochial as once was the case. While one would expect Sean Scully to be top of the pile as usual, this has not been the case in 2024.
The highest price paid for work by an Irish artist was the €1.2m for sculptor Barry Flanagan’s Thinker at Christie’s in London. Although born in Wales, Flanagan had strong ties with Ireland, as he moved to Dublin and became an Irish citizen late in life. He is best-known to Irish art lovers for the giant bronze Drummer outside IMMA. In addition to this sale, he had a number of other six-figure sales including Large Troubador (€644,000 at Christie’s) and Large Left-Handed Drummer (€508,000 at Sotheby’s). With plenty of other six-figure sales around the world, Scully has hit the million-mark just the once, achieving exactly that figure for Cut Ground Orange, at Ketterer Kunst in Munich.
Miss Alice Fulton at Paisley Lawn Tennis Club by John Lavery, sold for €95,000 at Whyte’s in May 2024
Next in line was John Lavery with €516,000 for Paisley Lawn Tennis Club, at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh. The same tennis club in Paisley, Scotland, where Lavery holidayed regularly, inspired Miss Alice Fulton at Paisley Lawn Tennis Club, which sold for €95,000 at Whyte’s. Jack B Yeats with Discovery (€380,000) and Paul Henry with A Village in West Cork (€280,000) were predictably next in line, both at Whyte’s, while William Orpen’s Portrait of a Lady sold for €240,000 at Nye & Co in New Jersey. And the consistently popular William Scott popped up even further away at Deutscher and Hackett in Australia, where New Life, Study sold for €213,000.
Gerard Dillon continues to do well – his best price in 2024 so far is the €100,000 for The Table in the Blue Room at Morgan O’Driscoll last month. Another notable Dillon sale occurred at Adam’s, where the small and modestly guided (€8/12,000) Man and Dog went for €26,000.
Some unusual names turned up in the past year. How many people are familiar with John George Mulvany? This mid-19th century figure’s wonderfully bucolic depiction of the Howth of that period, complete with milkmaids and cud-chewing cows, went under the hammer at deVeres for €40,000. English artist Thomas M Madawaska Hemy is another figure unfamiliar to Irish auction followers, as his connection with this country is mainly through paintings based on his holidays on the Aran Islands. His sale at Adam’s represented a coup for one prescient punter, who bought his Aran Funeral, Inishmaan at an auction in Brescia, Italy at the Casa D’Aste Capitolium for €400 in 2023. This was more a steal than a bargain for a painting that would sit comfortably in an Irish museum. It sold at Adam’s for €11,000.
Amongst our living artists, Genieve Figgis did best with €75,000 for Ladies in the Grass at Christie’s in Hong Kong. Donald Teskey continues to be popular with Irish buyers and Coastline Narrative yielded his best price (€40,000) at deVeres in early November. This had a very modest guide price of €6/9,000 for such a large and impressive painting. The quirky work of John Boyd also did well in 2024. The Gallery of Forking Paths sold at Adam’s for €20,000 (guiding at €8/12,000).
In terms of volume, the reclusive, Cappaquin-based Arthur K Maderson was ubiquitous, with almost 50 works on offer in his customary French Impressionist style. He consistently hit his guide prices or better – mostly around the €4,000 mark.
