The 20in x 2ft (51 x 61cm) oil on canvas had been unseen in public since it was acquired in 1930 by a member of the vendor’s family.
The subject of a noisy café was likely derived from the sketches on scraps of paper that the artist made while walking around London. Indeed several intricate preparatory drawings for The Tea Garden can now be found in the collections of the Tate in London, the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield and the Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Nottingham.
The large number of figures in the work, the energy of the scene, the range of gestures and wry details, including the different classes rubbing shoulders in a public setting, meant the work at Sotheby’s was highly desirable for followers of Roberts. Its fresh colours and market freshness also added to its commercial appeal.
In terms of auction prices for the artist, the sumefetched stands only behind the premium-inclusive £1.16m paid for The Chess Players from 1929 which also sold at Sotheby’s in May 2012.
‘Thinker on Rock’ by Barry Flanagan, a 6ft 3in (1.89m) high bronze conceived in 1996 and one of two artist's casts from an edition of 8.
The price for The Tea Garden was also the joint-highest at Sotheby’s evening sale of Modern British art, along with the sum made by Barry Flanagan (1941-2009) sculpture, Thinker on Rock from 1996, that was also knocked down at £700,000 (est: £300,000-500,000).
The sale’s overall hammer total was £4.66m with 26 of the 31 lots finding buyers.
The buyer’s premium was 25/20/12%.
