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Oil painting


Drambuie art at £2.7m and counting

30 January 2006

On a cold January 26 night in Edinburgh, a packed saleroom at Lyon & Turnbull witnessed a defining moment in the Scottish art market.

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Strange tale of a nude awakening

18 October 2005

When Alex Butcher’s eye was drawn to this painting, right, he did not realise that part of the attraction might have been its familiarity.

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You may have to lie down for this one…

15 March 2005

GORRINGES were celebrating a house record last Thursday following the sale of a rediscovered late work by John William Godward (1858-1922) for £440,000.

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On the forbidden warpath…

01 March 2005

A WORK of art in itself, a piece of US history and redolent of the tragic past of the American Indian tribes in which so many collectors are now passionately interested. Could any artefact be more likely to guarantee a huge price than this Blackfoot war bonnet, right, dating from the early/mid 19th century but still in fine condition?

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Mulready’s orphans find new home

07 February 2005

Appearing at Frank R. Marshall’s (15% buyer’s premium) sale at Knutsford, Cheshire on January 11 and selling at £720, was this 10 x 7in (25 x 18cm) oil-on-canvas, right, by Augustus Edwin Mulready (fl1863-1880 d.1886). Framed, mounted and indistinctly signed, it showed a characteristic subject for the artist, and was estimated at £200-300.

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Suddenly, Dora is in keen demand

18 January 2005

What makes a painting totally uncommercial one year and a sure-fire seller the next?Clearly, if there was a general principal of financial success to be learned in the art market there would be rather more dealers appearing in the media’s annual rich lists than there are now.

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Redfield continues to give the right impression as expressionist Carles comes to the fore

04 January 2005

AS recently as a decade ago, the Pennsylvanian Impressionists or New Hope School – perhaps the most recognisable group of painters to emerge from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) – remained a relatively untapped seam for ‘serious’ auctioneers of the Mid-Atlantic States.

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Old Uncle Tom’s legacy

09 December 2004

Tom Pearse, Tom Pearse, lend me your grey mare, All along, down along, out along lee, For I want to go to Widecombe Fair, With Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Dan Whiddon, Harry Hawke, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.The traditional song Widecombe Fair was well known in Devon around the middle of the 19th century, as was the name Thomas Cobley Gent, of Buttsford, Colebrooke.

Hayman and Nicholson post provincial high

01 December 2004

ESTABLISHING a new landmark for any work of art sold at auction outside London, a family portrait by Francis Hayman (1708-1776) took £540,000 at John Nicholson’s Fernhurst salerooms last week.

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Vettriano’s early fan reaps £26,000 reward

20 October 2004

JACK Vettriano (b.1951) is not an artist normally associated with the North East of England, but one of the lesser known facts about Britain’s Most Popular Artist is that one of his first one-man exhibitions, if not the first, was held at the Corrymella Scott Gallery in Jesmond, an upmarket suburb of Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1992.

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A well-travelled gift to a friend

13 October 2004

THE chronicles of Captain Cook and his perils on the high seas of the South Pacific, possess a mixture of action, adventure, discovery, science and romance that is enough to capture the most hardened imagination.

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‘Yellowstone’ Moran’s lucky number comes up in a Reno casino

29 September 2004

COMMISSIONED in 1908 by the Thomas D. Murphy Calendar Co., Mists of Yellowstone, one of many pictures of what is now the Yellowstone National Park region painted by Thomas Moran, nearly doubled the previous saleroom best for the artist on July 29. It made $4.4m (£2.42m) in the grand ballroom of the Silver Legacy Resort & Casino in Reno, Nevada – where Coeur d’Alene Art hold an annual auction, the big event of the year for well-heeled lovers of Western art.

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The mermaid and the balloon

29 September 2004

AN Americana sale held by Eldreds of East Dennis on August 5-6 included a number of works by Ralph Eugene Cahoon Jr. (1910-82), a Cape Cod artist for whom mermaids and sailors, lighthouses and balloons were key themes, and the picture top right, a late addition to the catalogue, proved one of the Massachusetts sale’s greater successes, at $40,000 (£22,000).

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Henry’s cottages end notion that Ireland is losing its attractions

29 September 2004

SUSPICION that the market for Irish pictures, at least on this side of the Irish Sea, might be in a softer state than it was three or four years ago, were dramatically dispelled at the Guildford rooms of Clarke Gammon Weller (15% buyer’s premium) on September 7 when a rather late, but completely fresh-to-market, canvas by Paul Henry (1876-1958) was offered.

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‘£300’ Dutch pair pushed to £8000 by private rivals

22 September 2004

NOW that few dealers can any longer afford routinely to buy pictures for stock, auctioneers, particularly provincial auctioneers, have become increasingly reliant on private individuals to take take up the slack at their art sales.

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Will the tide change for Henderson?

16 September 2004

THE recently published, enlarged and revised second edition of Peter McEwan’s indispensable Dictionary of Scottish Art and Architecture describes the Perthshire-born landscape painter Joseph Henderson (1832-1908) as “one of Scotland’s half-forgotten painters who deserves better recognition than he has hitherto received”.

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Munnings is more of a dead cert these days

16 September 2004

REGULAR readers of Scott Reyburn’s Art Market will be only too aware that many equestrian paintings by Sir Alfred James Munnings (1878-1959) have in recent years shown significant increases in value. As he reported as recently as Antiques Trade Gazette No 1648, July 17, Munnings’ oil sketch Newmarket Cheveley was the only work to dramatically exceed its estimate in Sotheby’s Important British Picture sale on July 1.

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Maritime Massachusetts

09 September 2004

SHIP portraits are, as one might expect, popular with bidders at Eldred’s East Dennis auction galleries on Cape Cod.

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Hunting painting with a touch of fantasy

24 August 2004

THE controversy over whether fox hunting should be banned may rumble on, but, presumably, even the most committed hunt saboteur could not take exception to this intriguing Victorian fantasy painting.

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Far from his snowy fells, Farquharson sells at £17,000 on his break by sea

18 August 2004

PAINTINGS offered at Lyon & Turnbull’s (17.5% buyer's premium) July 21 Jordantone dispersal were mostly comfortable furnishing pictures of some quality including this uncharacteristic Joseph Farquharson oil, right, entitled Fisherwoman on a Deserted Sandy Beach. Very different from the artist’s trademark mix of sheep, heather and swirling snow, the 22in x 3ft (55x 91cm) image of a solitary figure walking barefoot on the shimmering sand went to a private buyer at £17,000.