Christmas Auction Art & Collectibles 8 December 2015

Ernest Columba Hayes RHA (1914-1978)

SLUICE BEHIND SWORDS, COUNTY DUBLIN” c.1929-1931”

gouache

signed lower right; inscribed on reverse thus Sluice behind “Swords, Co. Dublin main street, (on left from Dublin) when I

was 17 Years old or possibly 15 years / 1931 or 1929””

10¼ x 7¼in. (26.04 x 18.42cm)

Provenance:

Estate of Hildegard Hayes, the artist’s wife;

Whyte’s, 9 December 2012, ex lot 159;

Whence purchased by the present owner

A Dublin born artist, Hayes was a student at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in the years 1931 to 1934, where he

studied under Seán Keating and had his first painting accepted by the Royal Hibernian Academy while still a student

there. He went on to regularly show at the RHA for the rest of his life. He joined the Dublin Sketching Club in 1935 later

becoming the clubs secretary. He had his first one-man show at the Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin in 1937. In 1942

he was elected Associate of the RHA and three years later in 1945 became a full member. That same year he married

Irma Verona Maguire (née Stranger-Jones) a pianist and divorcée in London. From 1946 to 1956 he was President of the

Dublin Sketching Club after this period he relocated to London an in 1958 he completed a large portrait of the Duchess

of Gloucester, now in St Botolph’s Hall, which was exhibited in the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ Exhibition at the

Royal Institute Galleries. Irma died in Dublin in 1959 after battling with cancer. Later that year Hayes met Hildegard von

Hob in Gelting, Germany whom he married in 1960. From this point until 1977 he travelled extensively throughout

Europe working in Italy, France and Germany. A year after his death the RHA commemorated Hayes in a memorial

section. Thirteen years later, in 1992 a memorial exhibition was held at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art

some examples from this exhibition are included in this collection. Hayes made his home in County Wicklow from the

mid-1960s. Anne Crookshank highlighted his love of the land in the exhibition catalogue for Hayes’ 1992 Hugh Lane

exhibition, “We can be proud with Ernest Hayes of our lovely East coast as well as of the West which so many of his

contemporaries preferred. He is a painter of everyday people and everyday places but he see them and makes us see

them as poetry.”

€200-€300 (£140-£220 approx.)

Christmas Auction Ar t & Collectibles 8 December 2015