1920s Irish artists Kernoff and Swanzy showcase contrasting visions in Morgan O'Driscoll sale

In the spring auction rooms of Morgan O'Driscoll, two Irish paintings from the 1920s arrive as quiet emissaries from a generation that had to choose between the world it inherited and the one being born. Harry Kernoff's watercolour, earned through scholarship at twenty-one, arranges the ages of life on a railway staircase with Victorian tenderness; Mary Swanzy's Mercury's Orbit dissolves the human figure entirely into the mathematics of planetary motion, answering Einstein rather than tradition. Together, across 239 lots estimated between €25,000 and €40,000, they pose the question every era m