CLOSE to 1,000 people turned up at de Vere's art auction last Tuesday evening at the National Concert Hall. Many of them were intent on buying one of the 160 odd works by the late and little known Phil Rafferty, a talented artist and close friend of Gerard Dillon, who painted up to her death last year but only exhibited twice in her life.

There were no reserves on any of the paintings; however, most of them sold way beyond de Vere's estimates. For instance, one man who left a commission bid for £250 on a picture telephoned the next day to find that it had sold for £3,800.

Some smaller pictures did sell for as little as £200 and £300 but most of the mixed media works, which had been expected to make £500-£600, sold for between £1,500 and £2,000.

The sale totalled £140,000 and almost all the pictures were bought by private buyers, according to John de Vere. The studio sale was followed by de Vere's regular art auction, where, again, people seemed prepared to pay way beyond the estimates.

George Campbell's small watercolour of Brendan Behan (est £500-£700) made £1,700; lot 46, Martin Gale's Returning Home, pictured in this column last week, with a top estimate of £1,800, sold for £3,000; Daniel O'Neill's colourful Foreshore, Co Antrim made £6,000 (estimate £3,500-£5,000); and Gerard Dillon's portrait of a man in Roundstone (believed to be Dan O'Neill) sold for £8,700 (estimate, £5,000-£7,000).

A typical work by Paul Henry, a Kerry landscape, was the top selling lot, fetching £12,000 under the hammer. Six small Percy French watercolours sold extremely well - lot 21, of boats at dusk, made £2,900, almost twice its top estimate.