'Yeats poem' stately home up for sale

An auction at one of Ireland’s most historically well-connected stately homes is expected to reach €2m tonight – double experts’ predictions.

More than 400 out of 600 lots have so far been sold at Lissadell House, Co Sligo, which has strong links with Dublin’s 1916 Easter Rising against British rule.

Lissadell featured in a poem by W B Yeats, and until earlier this year was home to a family centrally caught up in the Irish fight for independence in the early years of the last century.

The Gore-Booths had lived in the house since it was built about 170 years ago until it was sold to barristers Eddie Walsh SC and his wife Constance Cassidy SC who intend to keep it open to the public.

Among the eclectic mix of furniture, paintings and mundane objects being sold to hundreds of locals, international buyers and private collectors was a painting by Sarah Henrietta Purser which was sold to an Irish collector for €239,000. All prices include buyer’s premium.

The portrait of Constance and Eva Gore-Booth was expected to fetch up to €50,000.

A world record was broken with the sale of a Joseph Patrick Haverty painting, The Limerick Piper sold for €227,000, seven times the highest price previously paid for his work.

“It has been an incredibly successful auction,” said Christie’s spokeswoman Jill Potterson.

“It’s amazing. There are around 800 people here and it looks like the auction’s going to fetch at least double what we had predicted.”

Other lots sold today include a pair of wooden toilet seats for €50 and a cardboard box full of flannel aprons and feeding bottle which fetched €60.

The new owners of Lissadell are believed to have made significant purchases at the auction mostly pieces of Irish furniture and items regarded as key to the house.

“There is something for all tastes, the attics, out-houses storerooms, gun room, Butler’s quarters, kitchens and sculleries have provided an ideal hunting ground to pick up unusual and highly usable objects with a unique history,” said Ms Potterson.

Lissadell was the childhood home of Constance Gore-Booth, who in later years, as Countess Markiewicz, was closely connected with the leaders of the struggle for independence and became the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons.

Constance Gore-Booth lived at Lissadell with her sister Eva and it was their beauty, as well as the elegance of the building itself, which is believed to have inspired Yeats to write the lines: “The light of evening, Lissadell, great windows open to the south. Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle.”

The countess fought alongside the Irish insurgents during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and was condemned to death by the British authorities. Her sentence was later quashed and she was imprisoned instead.

After refusing to take her seat as the first woman MP at Westminster, she later sat as a member of the first Dail, the Irish parliament.