Sotheby’s annual Irish Art sale in London on 9 September 2020 will be led by works from the collection of Sir Michael Smurfit, assembled over some thirty years to furnish his K Club golf and hotel resort and his private residence in Co Kildare. In total, more than 50 works from the collection will be offered across a series of London auctions through the year, with a combined pre-sale low estimate of 5.3 million pounds (5.9 million euros).
Nineteen works with a combined pre-sale low estimate of 2.6 million pounds (2.9 million euros) will headline the September sale, preceded by a public exhibition, by appointment, at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin from 27 to 30 August. The collection is strongest in Ireland’s leading painters, among them Jack B. Yeats, Sir John Lavery and Sir William Orpen, several of whose pictures once hung in the K Club’s Yeats Room.
The centrepiece is Louis le Brocquy’s Travelling Woman with Newspaper, 1947 to 1948 (est. 700,000 to 1,000,000 pounds / 786,000 to 1,123,000 euros). When it last sold at Sotheby’s twenty years ago, where Sir Michael acquired it, the painting set an auction record for the artist that still stands. The pinnacle of le Brocquy’s Tinker series, it is regarded by the artist as one of only four pictures that would define his legacy, and the only one of that group in private hands.
Sir John Lavery is represented by Lady Evelyn Farquhar, 1906 (est. 600,000 to 800,000 pounds / 674,000 to 898,000 euros), and by Les orangers du Beau Site de Cannes, 1929 (est. 300,000 to 500,000 pounds / 337,000 to 561,000 euros), coming to market for the first time in twenty-five years. Jack B. Yeats’s In Tír Na Nóg, 1936 (est. 300,000 to 500,000 pounds / 337,000 to 561,000 euros), purchased from Waddington Galleries in 1988, appears at auction for the first time.
Further Irish works include Sir William Orpen’s The Window: Night, circa 1907 (est. 80,000 to 120,000 pounds / 90,000 to 135,000 euros), Augustus John’s Portrait of W.B. Yeats, 1930 (est. 70,000 to 100,000 pounds / 79,000 to 112,000 euros), and William Conor’s The Dublin Horse Show (est. 80,000 to 120,000 pounds / 90,000 to 135,000 euros).
Sir Michael’s taste extended beyond Ireland, most notably to Scandinavia. Later sales will offer Sir Alfred Munnings’s The New Standard, Presentation of Standards 1927 (est. 250,000 to 350,000 pounds / 281,000 to 393,000 euros), Anders Zorn’s Woman Skiing (est. 300,000 to 500,000 pounds / 337,000 to 561,000 euros), and two Carl Larsson watercolours celebrating family life in Sundborn, each estimated at 150,000 to 200,000 pounds (168,000 to 225,000 euros). A further group of Irish works will follow in Sotheby’s Irish Art sale in 2021.
(Press Release)
