Those digging up Irish keepsakes for St Patrick’s Day this Wednesday should keep their eye out for anything that could be valuable. A rare Irish memento could make you tens or hundreds of thousands while a masterpiece by an Irish painter could turn you into a millionaire.
Even the most unlikely of items could make you a windfall so be careful what you discard. Here are ten things worth watching out for when gathering together any Irish mementoes.
PENAL CROSSES
You may have some small old wooden crucifixes lying around your home which could be worth a few grand. Penal crosses are small crosses from the eighteenth century which Irish people and priests hid during the penal days. The crosses were often bought by those making a pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg. They were carved in yew wood with the figure of Christ and other symbols on the front and the date often on the reverse. You can typically fetch up to between €2,000 and €3,000 for a penal cross thou
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Country Life
Trending: The enamel-filling process of making Cloisonné. Credit: Alamy
Flamboyant and colourful, the best examples of cloisonné render flowers, fruits and dragons in a rainbow of multi-hued enamel on metal, enthuses Matthew Dennison.
Settlers from the Islamic world, travelling to the western Chinese province of Yunnan late in the 13th century, are most often credited with introducing to the Yuan dynasty a method of decorating metal vessels with coloured enamels. Acclaimed by Caroline Schulten, Sotheby’s European head of Chinese art, as ‘incredibly decorative, wonderfully colourful and even appealingly blingy’, this technique is known today as cloisonné.
‘It’s a very splendid, flamboyant decorative style, especially in the case of early Ming dyn-asty pieces, the colours of which are particularly vibrant,’ explains Dr Schulten, who attributes cloisonné’s perennial appeal for European and Chinese collectors to a combination of polychr