Modern British Art

Renowned today for his fusion of Post- Impressionism and eastern European folk-art, the Jewish painter Mark Gertler (1891-1939) was inspired at the outset of his career by the northern and early-Italian Renaissance masters.

A painting by Herbert Arnould Olivier (1861-1952), a British artist and the uncle of the actor Lawrence Olivier, is among the stand-out works on show in Jeremy Green’s third gallery exhibition this year.

Two exhibitions in Mayfair this month offer a reappraisal of a clutch of artists who lived and worked in St Ives.

The relaunched British Art Fair opened with a flurry of sales at its new London venue, the Saatchi Gallery.

Wintry scenes by two local artists created a brighter picture at a recent auction in Yorkshire.

Described by one of his biographers as ‘The Last of the Norwich School’, Leonard Squirrell (1893-1979) was an East Anglian man through and through.

A view of a Tyneside street by Spennymoor mining artist Norman Cornish (1919-2014) took £5500 at local auction house Anderson & Garland (20% buyer’s premium).

The British Art Fair is an annual feeding ground for collectors of modern and post-war British art. This year’s staging of the 30-year-old event, which runs from September 20-23, marks a new chapter for the fair as it moves to London’s Saatchi Gallery.

British modernist Kenneth Lauder (1916-2004) used to entreat his opticians to create spectacles that would allow him to see the world upside down. They refused, but he remained determined to view life in a different way.

August is the month when Scotland takes it up a notch while the rest of the art world has a breather.

Henry Moore has been in the UK headlines recently thanks to the BBC Fake or Fortune? programme which revealed a watercolour sketch to be an authentic early lost work by the British sculptor and artist.

'Elements of Foliate Heads' will be instantly familiar to fans of John Piper (1903-92), despite the fact that the picture has not been on the market for more than half a century.

Unseen on the market since 1946, a view of Sloane Square (below) by Robert Buhler (1916-89) raced to £5000 at Ewbank’s (22.5% buyer’s premium).

In his later years, Welsh painter Wilf Roberts spent time going on drives, his wife Sue at the wheel, out to the Anglesey countryside. He would set off with pencils or watercolours to sketch landscapes while she waited for him in the car, reading.

A cartoon by Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) offers a rare and light-hearted look at her married life.