In a sale brokered by Mark Adams, the 1951 oil My Family has been bought by Lochlann Quinn, Dublin businessman and chairman of the Allied Irish Bank, for £1.7m – a record for any living Irish artist.
Mr Quinn has donated the picture to the National Gallery of Ireland under section 1003 of the Irish Consolidated Finance Act, which provides tax relief on donations to national collections of objects of historical and cultural importance.
Rejected in 1952 by the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, the picture won the Prealpina Prize at the 1956 Venice Biennale where it was bought by the Nestlé Corporation and hung in their Milan headquarters until its recent sale.
Le Brocquy’s oil Travelling Woman with Newspaper made £1.15m at Sotheby’s Irish sale in May 2000.
£1.7m reject returns
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.
