We were delighted to organise the sale of three oils from the estate of Margarete Marks to the National Gallery of Ireland in 2018. These included an important early portrait of the artist’s husband, the educator Harold Marks, and two still lifes from the 1940s-50s.
The National Gallery of Ireland is a dynamic institution that has grown and adapted its collections and the buildings that house them continually over the last century. As the name suggests it houses the national collection of Irish and European art. It is located in the centre of Dublin and was founded in 1854. The gallery has an extensive, representative collection of Irish paintings and is also notable for its Italian Baroque and Dutch masters painting.
It has benefited from a number of bequests over the years, perhaps most famously via the gallery director Hugh Lane (1875–1915) following his untimely death in the Lusitania. Not only did he leave a large collection of pictures, he also left part of his residual estate and the Lane Fund has continued to contribute to the purchase of artworks to this day. George Bernard Shaw also made a substantial bequest, leaving the gallery a third of royalties of his estate in gratitude for the time he spent there as a youth.