March 17th: St. Patrick’s Day

March 17th: St. Patrick’s Day

Today’s celebrations honor the death of Saint Patrick, the foremost patron saint of Ireland. Here are a few auction items of Irish descent.

In 2004, Her Majesty’s Prison Maze in Northern Ireland held an auction. Officials failed to empty file cabinets that were auctioned off, resulting in a hefty fine.

800 years of Irish military, political and literary items, were auctioned off in 2014. View the top 10 items here. The top item sold for a little over $95,000 and was The Proclamation of Independence of the Irish Republic, printed in Dublin, 23rd April 1916.

Francis Bacon painted the most expensive work of Irish art in 1969, a triptych, called “Three Studies of Lucian Freud”, which went for a hammer price of over $142 million in 2013. It just so happened to be the most expensive work of art by any painter.

A brass plate from the coffin of Ireland’s most hated man, Oliver Cromwell, was auctioned by Sotheby’s, and went for more than six times the estimate.

An Irish Navy vessel, LÉ Aoife, was due to be auctioned off in February, but was donated to refugee rescue efforts in the Mediterranean instead.