Drawings & Pastels

David Hockney (b.1937) and the late Lucian Freud (1922-2011) have captured the public imagination at the moment.

THE term ‘masterpiece’ is all too commonplace in auctioneering hyperbole, but just occasionally it rings true.

A COLLECTION of Augustus John drawings, consigned by the family of Dame Elizabeth Taylor, will be sold by a West London auction house on September 28.

FOUR sketches by Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais, found tucked inside covers of Led Zeppelin LPs, have been withdrawn from sale at Chilcotts auctioneers in Tiverton, Devon, because of a “misunderstanding over ownership” according to the auctioneers.

IN the early hours of August 6, a Henry Moore sketch and two oil paintings were stolen from Trinity House on the High Street in Broadway, south Worcestershire.

Led Zeppelin, Robert Burns and a 14-year-old John Everett Millais might seem unlikely bedfellows. But a group of four pencil drawings which have surfaced at the Devon auctioneers Chilcotts of Tiverton appear to link the three.

WILTSHIRE auctioneers Netherhampton Salerooms were celebrating a new house record on March 3 after a disbound album of Far Eastern topographical drawings sold for £43,000.

Culture minister Margaret Hodge has placed a temporary export ban on Raphael's Head of a Muse after ruling that an attempt should be made to keep the £26m drawing in the UK.

The latest Old Master sales in London underlined the importance for auctioneers of securing the best works by major names.

THE original drawings that Edward Lear made for his 1846 A Book of Nonsense are now rare, and those that exist are for the most part held in institutional collections.

TURN the leaves of ‘A sketchbook belonging to Lady Julia Conyers...’ and you will find some 80 drawings and watercolours by Lady Julia and her society friends that are for the most part unexceptional and predictable.

A Borders property provided Thomson Roddick (15% buyer's premium) with a sensational discovery for their sale in Rosewell, Edinburgh on December 4.

FOUND hanging in a Boston bathroom, the whereabouts of this Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) illustration had been a mystery for more than 80 years. Entitled The Climax, and hanging in the lavatory alongside another Beardsley pen-and-ink drawing called A Platonic Lament, the owners had no idea of its significance.

TO the connoisseurial mind, it was not the paintings that lit up the Old Master series in London in early July but rather three rediscovered drawings by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) offered in a dedicated Old Master and 19th century works on paper sale at Christie’s on July 8.

A world record price for a comic-strip illustration was paid at a specalist sale at Artcurial in Paris on March 29: Georges Remi Hergé’s 1932 ink-and-gouache design for the cover of Tintin en Amérique.

MASTER Drawings in New York, a new Anglo-American trade initiative will be launched in January. It is modelled on Master Drawings in London which has been held since 2001.

“A MOMENT of European importance” is how architects acknowledge Tyringham Hall in Buckinghamshire. It is one of the greatest country houses designed by Sir John Soane (1753-1837), the leading architect of his generation.

Enigmatic, elusive, rarely seen, and classified as mad – but that’s our Dadd!

The rainbow plate seen above right comes from an 1814 first issue* of David Cox’s Treatise on landscape Painting and Effect in Watercolours, an oblong folio work that incorporates a hand-coloured aquatint frontispiece and 31 plates (15 coloured, 15 in sepia) as well as 24 soft ground etchings.

A group of 19th century sepia drawings, depicting Aborigines in Queensland, came up for auction at Brightwells (15% buyer’s premium) sale of paintings and prints on January 26 in Leominster, Herefordshire.