How to Buy Irish Paintings: Galleries, Auctions, Art Fairs and Prints
To buy Irish paintings, you have four main routes: commercial galleries, auction houses, exhibitions and graduate shows, and archival prints of the paintings you cannot afford to own outright. Each suits a different budget and a different kind of buyer, and the right one depends mostly on whether you want a particular picture or simply the feeling of Ireland on your wall.
This guide walks through the options in Ireland, roughly what to expect on price, and how to tell when a print is the sensible choice. If you want the background on oils specifically, our guide to Irish oil paintings and original versus print covers that ground.
Commercial galleries
Galleries are the best place to start if you want a living artist and are happy to build a relationship. Dublin has long-established names such as the Kerlin Gallery, Taylor Galleries and Solomon Fine Art, and most counties have at least one regional gallery showing local painters. A gallery will show you the work in person, explain the artist's career, and usually offer a certificate of authenticity. Prices are set by the gallery and the artist, and they tend to be firm.
Auction houses
Auctions are where older and better-known Irish painters change hands. Whyte's, Adam's and de Veres in Dublin hold regular Irish art sales, and Cork has its own saleroom in Morgan O'Driscoll. Catalogues are published online ahead of each sale, with estimates and condition notes, and you can usually view the lots in advance.
Two cautions. The hammer price is not the final price, because a buyer's premium and tax are added, so read the terms before you bid. And auction estimates assume you know what you are looking at: condition, provenance and framing all affect value, so ask for a condition report if you cannot view the picture yourself.
Exhibitions, open studios and graduate shows
The cheapest route to an original is often the least formal. The Royal Hibernian Academy's annual exhibition in Dublin is open to submissions and sells work across a wide range of prices. Art colleges, including NCAD in Dublin, hold end-of-year graduate shows where new artists sell directly. Many working painters also open their studios or sell through their own websites. Small works on paper and little oils from emerging artists often start in the low hundreds of euro, while established living painters run into the thousands, and the great names in museum collections sit at the top of the auction market.
Where a print is the better buy
Many of the paintings people search for are in public collections. The Meeting on the Turret Stairs, Walter Osborne's Dublin and Roderic O'Conor's Brittany pictures will never come up for sale, and the privately owned ones can cost more than most homes. An archival print is the honest way to live with those images. A good one uses museum-grade matte paper and pigment inks, shows the brushwork, and costs a fraction of an original.
Prints also let you try a subject before committing. If you are unsure whether a seascape or a portrait suits your hall, hang a print first. You can browse the full range in our Irish art prints collection, the landscape and seascape prints, or the framed prints if you want something ready to hang. For frames and sizes, see our framing guide.
A sensible way to decide
If you want a relationship with an artist and are prepared to spend, visit galleries and the RHA. If you want a historic name and enjoy research, follow the auction catalogues. If you want the picture on your wall this month, buy a print and spend the savings on a good frame. Many collectors do all three, and a print of a painting you love is often what sends you looking for the originals.
If you are not sure which painters to look for, start with our guide to famous Irish artists, or read about James Arthur O'Connor, one of the first Irish painters to make landscape his subject.