State purchases a number of items in Yeats’ London auction

Over 200 items belonging to the Yeats family were sold at an auction in London last week.

The auction included a number of paintings, letters and personal items.

A desk used by WB Yeats sold for €170,000 - five times the reserve price placed on the item.

There were concerns that the sale of important Yeats family items would mean Ireland, and indeed Sligo, would lose out on precious artefacts, but it has since been learned that items could potentially be loaned out for exhibitions and such.

The State purchased a number of items prior to the auction, which was not known by the Yeats Society in Sligo.

Items purchased included letters, furniture and more.

“I am delighted that, over the past number of months, I have been in a position to assist both the National Library of Ireland and the National Museum of Ireland in acquiring significant additional sets of letters, items of furniture and other artefacts,” read a statement from Heather Humphries, Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

“The co-operative approach in managing the acquisition between the museum and library will also allow for major exhibitions to be held in the future using the collections of both institutions.”

“Agreement was reached that the letters should not be included in the sale, and they are now being purchased privately for €725,000, a purchase made possible by special allocation funding of €500,000 provided by Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Heather Humphreys, with the balance covered from the NLI’s own resources.”

In July this year the Minister provided €650,000 to the National Library and National Museum as follows: €500,000 was provided to the National Library for the purchase of a collection of letters between WB Yeats and his wife George (purchase price of €725,000); €150,000 was provided to the National Museum for the purchase of furniture and other artefacts (purchase price of €170,800).

Towards the end of 2016, the Minister provided the National Library with two tranches of funding for elements of the collection as follows: €118,000 towards the purchase of 10 letters between James Joyce and Yeats and the Yeats Dream diary (purchase price €293,256); €400,000 to enable the Library to purchase the Yeats Family library – which will complement Yeats’s own library, which is already in the possession of the National Library (purchase price €436,349).

In addition to these purchases, the donation by the family of Yeats’s Nobel medal and certificate in 2016, and a further donation of material which is currently being finalised will have a total value of almost €2.5m.

The acquisition of additional sets of letters and items of furniture adds substantially to the State’s archive of Yeats material.

The National Library also purchased a number of additional artefacts at last week’s auction to the value of over €72,000.

Martin Enright, President of the Yeats Society in Sligo said he was disappointed to see a number of Sligo related items go elsewhere, but it is not as bad as it initially looked.

“There could still be scope for getting some things here on loan. There were a few things that we would have loved to purchase like John Yeats’ sketches, an Innisfree tapestry and some of Jack Yeats’ sketches.”

Had there been an option to purchase some items prior to the auction, Mr. Enright says The Yeats Society would have liked to have been given time to try find funds to purchase these particular items.

“Once the catalogue was published things cannot be pulled.

“A lot of material has been published already and is available online like some of the letters and that.

“A lot of items have been purchased by the state, a considerable amount. But there were objects in the sale that we weren’t given the option to try and get a bit of money to buy these items.

“We can’t criticise the Yeats family, they couldn’t continue to be curators,” he added.