The paintings . . . two by Jack B Yeats, four by Louis Le Brocquy and two by Gerard Dillon . . . were being offered for sale through sealed bids by the Emer Gallery in Belfast in conjunction with the Coloured Rain gallery in Templepatrick. While the overall reserve price came to just under 1.2m the works were expected to fetch significantly more.

The story begins more than half a century ago, however, when Malcolm and Meg Brush emigrated to America in 1948, bringing with them an impressive art collection comprising works by the likes of Yeats, Le Brocquy, Dillon, Nano Reid and Colin Middleton. In Ireland, Brush had been friends with the influential art dealer Victor Waddington, and bought many works from him and from the prestigious Gimpel Fils gallery in London. It is also believed that he established the Dundalk Art Gallery, where many of the paintings in his collection were exhibited.

Having moved to the US, he remarried in the early '70s following the death of Meg. But his second wife was not, apparently, a fan of his art collection, and it ended up in storage for many years.

Brush, now 88 and a widower, has Alzheimer's and lives in a nursing home. His family, hoping to pay for his medical bills, went through the contents of his home and discovered the paintings.

They then asked local auctioneer Richard D Hatch for an appraisal of the 40 paintings in the collection.

"It was an auctioneer's dream, " said Hatch. "I drove to what I thought was a normal house call, not far from my showroom. What I saw was the finest collection of art I've ever seen. It didn't take long for word to spread across the Atlantic. This was a huge sale."

As Eamonn Mallie writes in the Coming Home exhibition catalogue: "What Mr Hatch was soon to realise was that he had before him nothing short of a Klondike." And, indeed, just as gold diggers from all across the US and Canada swarmed into Klondike in the late 19th century, so too did the gallerists and collectors of Ireland descend upon Flat Rock, North Carolina, in the hopes of striking gold with a few cut-price Irish paintings.

"Flights were hastily booked and some dealers from both sides of the border took to the skies in the hope that no one else had an awareness of these icons of hidden Ireland, " writes Mallie.

But despite the efforts to keep the news to themselves, word spread quickly in the Irish art world.

"The secret however was no secret anymore when the hammer fell, " Mallie notes.

On the day of the auction last February, even Le Brocquy's son was outbid for his father's works.

Despite Hatch's realisation of the significance of his find, he had massively undervalued the works.

He estimated Dillon's Curragh on the Rocks at 3,000- 4,500 and Swans on the Boyne at 2,225 3,750; they were bought by the Emer/Coloured Rain galleries for 105,000 and 45,000 respectively. While this was a lot more than the auctioneer expected, the two Northern Irish galleries then set a reserve price of approximately 148,000 for the Curragh on the Rocks and over 80,000 for the Swans on the Boyne.

The Hatch art sale fetched just over 1.1m in total for the collection. Unsurprisingly, most of the paintings were purchased by Irish collectors and ex-pats.

The Emer/Coloured Rain galleries picked up the eight highlights of the auction, spending a total of 777,000 before VAT and charges. Back in Ireland, their total reserve price of 1.2m was substantially higher than this.

Obviously, the galleries were hoping to reap significant financial rewards from the Flat Rock gold rush by bringing the works home to Ireland, where such paintings are most in demand and have the highest worth. You could argue that there's nothing wrong with this, of course . . . it is business, after all.

"The press are absolutely obsessed with the price of them, almost to the extent where they feel as though us in the business are doing something wrong by selling them again, " said Martin Donnelly of Coloured Rain before the sale. "As I keep saying, we're not a charity and we are in business to make money."

But business has its risks, and the Flat Rock gold rush has backfired somewhat. Despite the hype within the art world and the flurry of media interest in last week's sale, the unusual decision to have a sealed bid rather than an auction seems to have flopped.

There were only two offers, and just two of the works were sold . . .the Gerard Dillons . . . for a total of just over 273,000.

"It wasn't popular at all. There was plenty of interest in the paintings but nobody liked the idea of the sealed bids, " says Michael Flanagan of the Emer Gallery, who is confident that the six remaining paintings will be sold in the end. "The offers basically did not come in."