• John P O’Sullivan
  

• 
  Spring 2025
  Volume 42. No. 1

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The Irish art market is a microcosm of the international market and it followed the general trends of that market in 2024. The two most notable features of both markets were the reduction of turnover after a number of recordbreaking years following the Covid-19 pandemic, and a sharp increase in the number of transactions. Put simply, more art is selling, but at the lower end of the price scale. The downturn in the worldwide market was reflected here with the announcement that Sotheby’s was closing its Dublin office after nearly fifty years in operation – one of a number of international closures. After a number of post-Covid world records for Irish art, prices have cooled off. Morgan O’Driscoll put it succinctly to me, saying that 2024 was ‘a good year overall in terms of volume, but not spectacular’. The only record of note for Irish art was for one of John Boyd’s Magritte-like Surrealist pieces, In The Garden Of Forking Paths II, which sold at Adam’s for €20,000 (guide €8,000 to €12,000).

There has been an increasing trend towards online auctions and more online action at room-based auctions. The buzz from a crowded auction room is, I fear, becoming a thing of the past. This tendency began out of necessity during the pandemic, when gatherings were prohibited, but that period sowed the seeds of public acceptance of this model. Now all auctions have a sophisticated online bidding process and many at the more modest end of the market are online only. The pathfinders to this online move on the Irish market were Morgan O’Driscoll and Whyte’s, who were first to develop sophisticated user interfaces that allowed detailed viewing of the art (closeups of signature, etc) and a bulletproof bidding process. The other auction houses have now caught up and, significantly, the public have shown increased willingness to buy works in the lower and middle ranges without seeing them in the flesh.

Trends noted by Artprice’s 2024 Contemporary and Ultra-Contemporary Art Market Report were the sharp increase in transactions at the lower end of the market – more than half in total, and the more willingness to buy online without actually viewing the art. Much of this affordable art involves multiples such as limited-edition prints. A notable exception to the appetite for online engagement was the virtual collapse of the market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) worldwide, down 90 per cent since 2021. This market barely impinged on the Irish scene, although a few of our more internationally focused artists did produce speculative offerings. Hughie O’Donoghue created a series of seven works on an iPad in 2021. Their ultimate fate is unknown. The whole NFT debacle failed to impact significantly on the Irish market, so few fingers were burned.

On the international market, the highest price for a work of art in 2024 went again to Jean-Michel Basquiat for Untitled (ELMAR), although its hammer price of $37 million was a far cry from Basquiat’s record of $89 million. On the Irish scene, our late-minted Irishman (he became an Irish citizen late in life) Barry Flanagan did best, with Thinker (one of his large bronze hares) selling for £1,050,000 at Christie’s in October. This was not too far from Flanagan’s record price – £1,200,000 for Nijinski Hare – in 2019. No other work by an Irish artist made over a million in 2024.

The top ten Irish sales were dominated by Jack Butler Yeats and William Orpen. Yeats’ O’Connell Bridge sold for £700,000 at Christie’s and Orpen’s Mrs Evelyn St George went for £600,000 at Sotheby’s. The best prices at Irish-based auction houses were Horseman by Jack Yeats at Adam’s (€400,000) and Discovery, again by Yeats, at Whyte’s (€280,000). Paul Henry scraped into the top ten with his A Village in the West yielding €280,000 at Whyte’s. Morgan O’Driscoll’s best price in 2024 was another Jack Yeats – Old Road, Cahirciveen, which hammered down at €160,000. Over at de Veres, Louis le Brocquy led the way with a lush Aubusson tapestry, Mille Tetes Gris Noir Blanc, yielding €155,000. A surprise omission from the top ten, based on recent years, was William Scott. However, looking over the various auctions for 2024, there weren’t that many high-quality works of his on offer. His best price was £230,000 for Blue Cup and Pears at Christie’s. Bonhams had an early Scott, Portrait of Denise Field-Reid (1938), which sold for £27,000.

Contemporary artists (born after 1946) were rare enough on the bestselling lists. Most of these were to be found at Morgan O’Driscoll, where Donald Teskey’s Sea and Shore achieved €44,000, continuing the artist’s consistently strong showing at auction. Conor Harrington’s Master of Money and Mirrors (€40,000) and John Shinnors’ Estuary Forms (€32,000) were next best for the Skibbereen-based auctioneer. Teskey was also noted at de Veres, where Coastline Narrative 1 yielded €40,000 in early November.

John Doherty’s meticulous Photorealism continues to do well. The Dolan Boys, Waiting!, one of his evocative studies of small-town Ireland, sold for €70,000 at de Veres – his second-highest price ever at auction. Gerard Dillon continues to do well. His best price in 2024 was the €100,000 for The Table in the Blue Room at Morgan O’Driscoll in their November sale.

The highest price for any living Irish artist (Sean Scully excepted) in 2024 was the HKD650,000 for Ladies in the Grass by Genieve Figgis at Christie’s in Hong Kong.

A few new names caught the eye. The 18th-century artist John George Mulvany’s Howth, Looking Over the Town, the Pier and Ireland’s Eye, a wonderfully bucolic depiction of the Howth of that period, complete with milkmaids and cud-chewing cows, went under the hammer at de Veres for €40,000. The English artist Thomas M Madawaska Hemy was another unfamiliar name. His connection with Ireland is based on holidays on the Aran Islands. His sale at Adam’s represented a coup for one sharp-eyed punter (perhaps an Irish person on holiday), who bought his An Aran Funeral: Inishmaan for €400 in 2023 at an auction in Brescia, Italy, at the Casa D’aste Capitolium. This was more a steal than a bargain for a painting that could sit comfortably in an Irish museum. It showed in piquant detail the funeral rites associated with the Aran Islands of the start of the 20th century. It sold at Adam’s for €11,000 – a record for the artist.

Very few Irish artists sell outside these islands. An obvious exception is Sean Scully, who sells all over the world. The Wicklow-based artist Genieve Figgis, armed with the imprimatur of Richard Prince (in the international top ten bestselling artists according to Artprice), can now claim to join him. Prince discovered Figgis’ work on social media and bought a piece. Figgis now sells her work for substantial prices in China, Hong Kong and the USA. Conor Harrington is another who, in addition to his popularity in the UK, sells well in France.

Outside the mainstream Irish and UK galleries, there were a number of notable sales for Irish artists. Scully hit the million-euro mark again for Cut Ground Orange at Ketterer Kunst in Munich, and he had plenty of other six-figure sales around the world. Next in line was John Lavery, with £430,000 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.) William Orpen’s Mrs Evelyn St George sold for $260,000 at faraway Nye & Co in New Jersey in the US in July, before it was flipped at Sotheby’s in November, realising three times that amount. And William Scott popped up even further away, at Deutscher and Hackett in Australia, where New Still Life Study sold for AUD 350,000.

John P O’Sullivan