Modern British Art

“Modern British sculpture is making extremely good money at the moment – it is a market moving as quickly, if not slightly quicker, than paintings.” So said Philip Smith, department head of Mallams (20% buyer’s premium).

A market-fresh figure study by Mod Brit giant LS Lowry (1887-1976), pictured below, topped the sale at Woolley & Wallis.

The so-called ‘Great Bardfield Artists’, named after the Essex village where a community of painters and designers lived from the 1930s onwards, has become fertile ground for local auction house Sworders (22% buyer’s premium).

Art assembled by Peter Mangold, the late political historian, led a strong line-up of Modern British pictures at Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) in Salisbury.

It may be strange and surreal, but John Spencer-Churchill’s (1909-92) landscape panorama of the evacuation of Dunkirk is the only depiction of the event known to have been painted by an eyewitness.

Modern and contemporary art gallery Belgrave St Ives is in the midst of its annual winter show, offering prints, drawings and three-dimensional works in its two adjacent Cornwall shops.

Modern British art by blue-chip names drove demand during the week-long series of November sales in London.

A William Nicholson (1872-1949) portrait drew admirers at Thomas R Callan (17.5% buyer’s premium) on November 19 as it was hammered down for £150,000.

Sotheby’s posted a record for the artist CRW Nevinson on November 21 when an important Great War scene was knocked down at £1.55m (£1.87m including premium).

Wright Marshall (21% buyer’s premium) featured a still-life by John Pawle (1915-2010) in its sale on October 28 in Knutsford, Cheshire.

The artist Stanley Anderson (1884-1966) was a perennial sceptic of 20th century ‘progress’. An engraver, etcher and watercolour painter, he started working in line engraving in the 1920s when it was an outmoded and almost extinct form of graphic output.

Just a clutch of canvases by the Cornish artist Marjorie Frances ‘Midge’ Bruford (1902-58) have gone under the auctioneer’s gavel.

For its final pair of exhibitions this year, The Fine Art Society in Edinburgh is staging Modern Scottish Paintings, 1940-85 and John Byrne Rock ‘n’ Roll from November 24-December 23.