Ireland

A Pottery by the Lagan: Irish Creamware from the Downshire Pottery, Belfast 1787-c.1806 by Peter Francis, published by the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, Belfast. ISBN 0853896941, £10stg, sb.

EIRE: WITH the traditional Irish sales due in London next month, many an eye was on the Dublin sale held by James Adams (15 per cent buyer’s premium) on March 28 to see how pictures were selling in their native land.

EIRE: BACK in May last year works by Dublin-born Louis le Brocquy (b.1916) entered the same price bracket as that of his compatriots like Yeats and Lavery when Sotheby’s took a record £1,050,000 (plus buyer’s premium) in London for his work entitled Travelling woman with newspaper.

Buyers who brave harsh winter weather warm to finer furniture UK: THE name of Henry Bone RA (1755-1834) which featured in London's first sale of portrait miniatures this year, was also a feature of the wider ranging sale held by James Adam in Dublin on February 28.

EIRE: WHYTES of Dublin held their spring coin sale on February 23. Their regular sale results are very useful for gauging the market in Irish material and with the enhancement of the Irish economy in recent years there is much interest in it. This is made manifest by the fact that most of the buyers reported by Whytes are resident in Ireland.

THERE are yet two major Sotheby’s sales of last December to report – the Travel & Map sale of December 14 and the English Literature & History sale of December 19 – but as there are no 2001 Sotheby’s sales scheduled until May, there is no fear of an overlap, and these sales aside, the three brief reports that appear below bring my wider coverage of the old year’s book sales to a close.

Treasures To Hold: Irish and English Miniatures 1650-1850 from the National Gallery of Ireland Collection by Dr Paul Caffrey, published by the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. tel: 01 661 5133. email: artgall@eircom.net ISBN 090316275X £19.99.

Back in 1948 a Dublin auctioneer sold the contents of a local property belonging to one Dr Cremins, which included a number of antiques purchased in the early years of the 20th century.

EIRE: ONE of a number of remarkable prices achieved at James Adam & Bonhams' Irish Art sale on December 8 was the record IR£50,000 (£41,665) given for Harry Kernoff's 1936 oil of a Dublin cab.

EIRE: The long-awaited auction of one of Ireland’s foremost collections took place in Dublin on October 14 when Mealy’s, in association with Christie’s, dispersed the contents of 25 Fitzwilliam Street Upper, former residence of the late James Murnaghan, a Justice of the Supreme Court and chairman of the National Gallery of Ireland.