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Art fans to vie for ‘Irish Pavarotti’ painting

Published Thursday, April 23, 2009, 10:44 AM

Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 5:28 PM

Read more: Ireland, Auctions

Christie's employees hang the portrait of Count John McCormack

Photo by Niall Carson/PA

A painting of Ireland’s most celebrated tenor will go up for auction next month, and art collectors from around the world are prepping for a bidding war.

The painting, by Dublin artist Sir William Orpen, depicts Athlone native John McCormack, “Ireland’s Pavarotti,” who in 1932, sang for two million people in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.

The McCormack painting is expected to go for as much as €678,000 (about $879,364) at the Irish and Sporting Art sale at Christie’s in London on May 7 and 8.

Interest has peaked from art collectors not just from Ireland, but from the Vatican and the U.S., where the famous opera singer lived for many years.

Collectors from the U.S. and the E.U. are expected to up the ante on the bidding due to the decreased value of the sterling.

The auctions will include the general Irish sale, as well as an auction from the Glin Castle collection in County Limerick and the Vincent Ferguson collection.

The auctions are expected to bring in around €4.5m ($5.8m) to €6.7m ($8.7m).

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For a comparatively small island, Ireland has made a disproportionate contribution to world literature in all its branches. Irish literature encompasses the Irish and English languages. The most widely-known Irish books are undoubtedly in English. Particularly famous examples of such works are those of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Ireland's four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. Ireland's oldest literary traditions, however, are found in the Irish language, referred to simply as "Irish." Indeed, Irish has the third oldest literature in Europe (after Greek and Latin). and the most significant body of written literature (both ancient and recent) of any Celtic language. Furthermore, the historic influence of Irish language traditions, such as a strong oral tradition of legends and poetry, has helped make much English Literature in Ireland quite distinctive from that in other countries. From the older tradition, many Irish books in English inherited a sense of wonder in the face of nature, a narrative style that tends towards the deliberately exaggerated or absurd and a keen sense of the power of satire. Irish books are rooted in Celtic mythology as well as the suffering and hardships the Irish people have experienced over the course of their history. Wit and humor, often in the form of satire or irony, have characterized much of Irish literature. Another key feature in Irish books has been the ample use of wordplay - from the early sagas to the 20th-century experiments of James Joyce. Irish poetry has a long and complex history. Ireland has one of the oldest vernacular literature and poetry traditions in Europe and represents a more or less unbroken cycle from the 6th century to the present day. In addition, since at least the 14th century, poetry in English has also been written in Ireland and by Irish writers abroad. In the 19th century, Irish poets writing in English set out to reinvent the Gaelic tradition in the new language, frequently translating early Irish poets and retelling stories from Celtic mythology in Romantic and Victorian verse and song. Particularly notable in this vein were the lyrics (poetical and musical) of Thomas Moore, author of several volumes of Irish Melodies. The trend reached its high point in the early work of W. B. Yeats. At the beginning of the 20th century, Yeats' style changed under the influence of his contact with modernism. The generation of Irish poets that followed Yeats were, to simplify, divided between those who were influenced by his early Celtic style and those who followed such modernist figures as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, both of whom wrote poetry as well as their better known fiction and drama. During the course of the 20th century, the influence of Yeats has tended to dominate the Irish books world, either as a role model or as someone to rebel against. However, this period also saw the emergence of such significant figures as Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney and Brian Coffey. This period also saw a revival of poetry in Irish, at least partly as a result of government policy decisions in support of the language. The most famous Irish novelist of the 20th century, James Joyce, is often regarded as the father of the literary genre "stream of consciousness" which is best exemplified in his famous work, Ulysses. Other books Joyce is famous for are Finnegans Wake, Dubliners, and the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce's high modernist style had its influence on coming generations of Irish novelists, most notably in the books of Samuel Beckett. Cathal O Sandair (1922-1996), one of the most prolific authors of Irish books, produced over one hundred novels, many of them westerns featuring cowboys and gunfights. The twentieth century saw a number of playwrights come to prominence in the world of Irish books. These included Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Denis Johnston, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard, and John B. Keane.

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