€230,000 for abandoned Yeats paintings

TWO abandoned Jack Butler Yeats’ paintings have fetched €230,000 at auction in Canada.

The works, The Boat Builder and The Mail Car, Early Morning were discovered nearly 20 years ago in a farm outhouse near Toronto.

They were originally bought 80 years ago on a visit to Ireland by an academic Alfred Tennyson DeLury.

His descendants, unaware of their value, had stored them in a barn at their family farm, near Toronto. His grandnephew Robert DeLury, who attended the auction, said the family was overjoyed at the interest and the strong prices the paintings attracted.

A reference to the paintings in a 1930 art gallery catalogue prompted two Canadian art dealers David Heffel and Robert Heffel to contact the DeLury family.

The 9 inch x 14 inch oil-on-panel paintings were found in the barn. The Mail Car, Early Morning depicts the artist’s memory of a visit, at the turn of the last century, to Ballina in County Mayo in the company of playwright John Millington Synge. It fetched €128,000.

The Boat Builder captured two men working at a boat watched by an old man sitting in a chair at Carna in Co Galway. It was acquired for €103,000 by a telephone bidder from the USA. The works were sold along with eight other pieces of Irish art by the Heffel Fine Art Auction House.