Paul Henry's The Turf Gatherer fetched €300,000 at an art auction last night.
The 1911 painting of a woman toiling beneath a basket of sods on Achill Island contributed a sizeable chunk to the €2.1 million spent in Dublin last night on the Irish art collection of Cork paediatrician and gynaecologist JB Kearney.
The painting has not been seen in public since it was exhibited at Trinity College and in Belfast in 1974. Since then, it has been hung on the walls of Dr Kearney's house, Chiplee, in Cork city.
Dr Kearney died in 2006, aged 90, and his family decided to sell the work he collected throughout the second half of the 20th century.
Chiplee's walls and tables were crowded with hundreds of significant paintings and sculptures, and the crowd of bidders keen for a glimpse of the collection spilled out the doors of Adam's auction house on St Stephen's Green last night.
The standing-room only crowd meant there was no question of latecomers entering the auction room, let alone trying to catch the auctioneer's eye.
Some intending buyers collected their bidder's paddle only to discover they had no hope of getting near the action. Mostly they stayed in the ground floor reception area, listening to the hammer's fall via loudspeakers.
Most of the significant 20th century Irish works of art in Dr Kearney's collection sold above the guide price.
Bidders paid €120,000 for Torso by Dr Kearney's friend Louis Le Brocquy and €190,000 and €210,000 for works by Jack Butler Yeats, The Sky from the Train (1943) and The Tinker's Child (1926). Gerard Dillon's Inishlacken sold for above €180,000, more than double the guide price, while Patrick Collins's French Farm House (1964) was bought for €58,000.
Dr Kearney and his wife Rhoda began collecting art in the 1950s, and had built up a formidable collection by the late 1960s.
Last night's auction was for their Irish art, while their international pieces by artists including Pablo Picasso will be sold on December 11th.