A 1903 watercolour of a captured pirate about to walk the plank made £84,000 yesterday. A smaller sketch of a young boy lying in the sand dunes reading a book about piracy reached £24,000.

An impression of the bathing lido in Venice by Sir John Lavery (1856-1941), featuring Edwardian ladies strolling with parasols on the beach, reached £436,000 in the same auction.

After decades as a fashionable society portraitist, Lavery became an official artist in the first world war. He lent his London home to Michael Collins and the Irish delegation during the negotiations for Irish independence before returning to live in the republic in the 1930s.

A deserted Donegal landscape - clouds, mountains, and a peat bog - by Belfast-born Paul Henry (1876-1958) exceeded estimates and was bought for £120,000. Henry spent the most tumultuous decade of Ireland’s recent history, from 1910 to 1919, on Achill island off County Mayo.

18th-century work by James Barry, King Lear Weeping Over the Body of Cordelia, which sold for £982,000.

Posted: 05|12|06 at 9:46 am. Filed under: Fine Arts Antiques.