Gerard Dillon’s “Tea Party” Surges to €1.4 Million at Adam’s Auctioneers
A 1955 painting by Gerard Dillon has delivered a sharp jolt to the market for the Belfast-born artist. “Tea Party” sold for €1.4 million, including fees, at Adam’s Auctioneers in Dublin on May 27, after an unknown phone bidder drove the price to roughly 450 percent above its €150,000–€200,000 estimate.
The result set a new auction record for Dillon and more than tripled his previous high of £378,000, achieved at Sotheby’s London in 2020. For a painter whose market had been largely subdued since the late 2000s, the sale marks a notable reversal. According to the Artnet Price Database, Dillon’s strongest auction activity peaked in 2006 before falling away after 2008.
Nicholas Gore Grimes, director for fine art at Adam’s Auctioneers, described “Tea Party” as “a seminal work” with “a rich exhibition history,” adding that he believes it is the finest Dillon to surface on the market in the past 35 years. The painting’s appeal is easy to trace: an oil on board scene of six people seated around a table in a cottage in Roundstone, County Galway, it was first exhibited in 1955 in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in Belfast and Dublin.
The catalogue notes the work’s “characteristic impish, wiry humor” in the sitters’ expressions. One figure, wearing a red neck scarf and looking directly at the viewer, has long been speculated to be the artist himself.
Born in Belfast in 1916, Dillon was a self-taught painter who worked across London, Dublin, and Belfast, while spending significant time in Roundstone, the Connemara village that inspired many of his paintings. He represented Ireland at the Guggenheim International and Great Britain at the Pittsburg Bicentennial International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture in 1958. He died in 1971, at 55.
The sale suggests that Dillon’s market may be entering a new phase, with collectors once again paying close attention to the artist’s most accomplished works.
