Yeats paintings to be auctioned in Canada

Two paintings by Jack B. Yeats found in a barn in Ontario will come under the hammer later this week in an auction in Toronto.

The two nine-by-fourteen-inch oil on panel paintings, one of which depicts the playwright J.M. Synge on a journey he and the artist made to the west of Ireland, are expected to fetch over €75,000.

The pictures were purchased by a Canadian university professor, Mr Alfred Tennyson Delury, in 1923 and have remained in the family ever since.

The paintings will be auctioned on Thursday by one of Canada's leading art auctioneers along with eight other pieces of Irish art by well-known artists such as Mr Colin Middleton and Mr Louis Le Brocquy.

The sales, conducted by Heffel Fine Art Auctioneers, will be broadcast live on the Internet.

A spokesman for the auctioneers said: "We have known about these valuable paintings for the past 14 years and have been actively working with the DeLury family to offer them for sale publicly".

He said: "The two Yeats paintings have not been viewed outside the DeLury family for more than half a century and were not deemed to be particularly valuable by them, except as family heirlooms."

The Boat Builderis understood to be based on Yeat's drawing Boat-Building at Carna which illustrated an article by Synge on the Galway boat builders.

Mail Car, Early Morningis said to depict the artist's memory of a visit to Ballina in Mayo in 1905, in the company of Synge.

The painting depicts a mail car approaching down a shadowy main street with the playwright, in the right foreground with a coat over his arm, starting towards the car.