A single-owner collection of prints by the artist John Piper will be auctioned next Thursday, at Christie's in London. The 200-lot collection is expected to fetch up to £200,000 sterling (#329,000).
John Piper (1903-1992) is quite well known in the Republic. Mr Stuart Cole, fine art director of James Adam & Sons, Dublin, told The Irish Times: "Irish people don't seem to have a great relationship with print. The very word seems to turn them off. Personally, I love prints. I like John Piper's work. I know his work quite well. I've seen his work come up and I've seen quite a few of his works in collections in Ireland and we've sold them."
Irish people tend to regard prints as "only reproductions" and wonder why they could be valuable. "But to a great extent the tradition has a much longer history and deserves to be a little bit more appreciated than it is. It's certainly more appreciated in England, New York or on the continent" where the market for prints is quite good. Prints by Piper were limited editions. Values of prints can depend on the edition and the number of copies made.
"In general, I tend to stay away from editions of more than 250. It's quite a good area of collecting if you want to collect works by people like Matisse, where an original work is beyond most people's ability to own. Yet you can buy a limited edition print produced by the artist. At the end of the day it's the image which should be the attraction as opposed to whether it's a watercolour or a print."
Rembrandt was one of the great print-makers. He made his living doing little etchings and knocking them out. They were really popular. It was traditionally the only way an artist had of publicising his work.
Prints can mistakenly be seen as copies of an original. While that may be true for mass-produced prints, it is untrue for limited editions. The artist individually signs prints and each is numbered. Rembrandt's prints were original works drawn with the express intention of transferring them to print.
"It's not a copy of an oil or it's not a copy of another work. It's something he did expressly with the intention of printing. Look at Andy Warhol. Some of his work is solely in print. The idea was for print. The whole conception of what he was doing was that this is going to be a print, not it's a copy of a larger artwork."
Mr Cole regards Patrick Hickey, regrettably deceased, as one of the Republic's great artists in print and a "genius".
"Some of his prints are just superb. Patrick worked in print and he also did oils and watercolours but a lot of his work was conceived and executed solely in print. Now I don't think that makes Patrick's work any less because that's the medium he chose to work in."
The Christie's auction carries estimates ranging from £100 to £4,000.
One of the earliest works included is a 1940 etching, Byland Abbey, Yorkshire, estimated at £500 to £700.
Eye and Camera: Flame Four, a screenprint depicting four repeated images of Piper's wife (1967), is also estimated at £500 to £700.
Foliate Head, a "rather luscious pink lithograph" from 1976, is estimated at up to £700, while a still life of flowers, Wild Bunch, from 1987, an etching and aquatint in colours, is valued at £1,000 to £1,500. A 1981 lithograph of West Walton in Norfolk is expected to fetch £1,200 to £1,800, while Sunflowers, 1989, a later etching and aquatint, carries the same estimate.
jmarms@irish-times.ie
