IMPORTANT IRISH ART Monday 4 December 2023 at 6pm, Lots 1-133

128 93 Rory Breslin (b.1963) THE JULY MARINE MASK bronze and stainless steel; (no. 1 from an edition of 3) signed and numbered on right side 26.50 by 14.50 by 9in. (67.3 by 36.8 by 22.9cm) The Clew Bay Marine Series are a series of bronze ‘seascapes’, chronicling by month the wealth and variety of sea life in Clew Bay. A great dusk-hunting Thornback Ray glides forward, its wings elegantly up-curved. Running externally underneath this Raja and flowing to a bow at the base of the work, the intertidal Bladderwrack, used as fertiliser of potato ‘lazy beds’ and in folklore for protection against mental derangement; encapsulates the remainder of the marine iconography. From the top the blind and regimental razor fish are arranged like strata in formation to the lower jawline. Below these and foraging in the Wrack, two shore crabs at odds with each other on either side of the seaweed, Dead Man’s fingers, Codium Fragile, that curl up below the chin. Perwinkles, an ancient human food source, adorn the seaweed while the inquisitive and open-mouthed youths countenance is decorated in the spiralling curls of the Lugworms castings. ’But while he passed before a plashy place, A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth Sang that somewhere to north or west or south There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race Under the golden or the silver skies’ —W.B. Yeats €4,000-€6,000 (£3,480-£5,220 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot93