Sales show Irish art market gradually returning to form

Slowly, the Irish art market is climbing out of recession.

Four sales of important Irish art over the past two weeks — at Adam’s, Whyte’s, de Vere’s and by Morgan O’Driscoll, reveal an undiminished interest in Irish art in a market where buyers want value for money.

People are not paying silly prices for Irish art. That is the stuff of booms. But any fresh-to-market work of quality is attracting numbers of bidders. The bankers — Osborne, Yeats, Paul Henry, Lavery — have proved their resilience. The most expensive painting in the latest spate of art auctions in Ireland was Walter Osborne’s The Ferry which sold for €495,000 at de Vere’s. This was the most important large landscape of Osborne’s early work and it was always going to do well.