Art Market

Private material sourced from old estates helped Gloucestershire saleroom Chorley’s (20% buyer’s premium) get the year off to a positive start.

Chiswick Auctions (25/12% buyer’s premium) has held its first dedicated Old Masters sale, capitalising on the void left by Christie’s South Kensington’s closure last year.

A bustling scene of Leicester Square by genre painter Edward Prentis (1797-1854) took £6800 at David Lay (18% buyer’s premium) of Penzance.

This painting of a fire in north London drew heated bidding when it went under the hammer at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (21% buyer’s premium).

As celebrations get under way to mark the centenary of women gaining the right to vote (or over-30s at least), the Modern British art market is showing a growing appetite for 20th century female artists.

A 19th century painted print of a Maori took top honours at Heliers Auction (18% buyer’s premium) in Blackburn, Lancashire.

Works on paper, not oil paintings, stole the show at Lawrences (22% buyer’s premium) of Crewkerne.

This painting of a saint sold for a multi-estimate £5400 at London Auctions (22% buyer’s premium) in Chiswick.

Modern and contemporary British art racked up £195,000 at a Roseberys (23% buyer’s premium) sale, with 80% of the 252 lots sold.

Traditional ‘country house style’ pictures were in plentiful supply at a two-day sale at Tennants of Leyburn.

Art by a pair of 20th century artists who actively avoided belonging to any artistic school or movement stood out in recent US auctions.

A reminder of the dramatic drop in demand over recent decades for Victorian landscapes was evident in Gloucestershire where two such oils by Sidney Richard Percy (1822-86) went under the hammer.

A small painting by Scottish artist Robert Gemmell Hutchison (1855- 1936) took a mid-estimate £6000 at Surrey saleroom John Nicholson’s (24% buyer’s premium).

A pastel portrait of a fashionable young Georgian woman in an ostrich feather hat and blue coat with her dog topped the picture section at Lincolnshire saleroom Golding Young & Mawer (20% buyer’s premium).

An 1894 pencil drawing of a street in Antwerp by Walter Frederick Osborne (1859-1903) was among the last contents offered at auction from West Horsley Place, the Grade I-listed mansion in Surrey owned by historian and broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne.

Paintings by lesser-known Pre-Raphaelites took the honours at the latest Victorian art sales held at Sotheby’s (25/20/12.9%) and Christie’s (25/20/12.5%).

An extensive collection with Astor family provenance offered at auction was billed as best of its type in more than 20 years.

He was among the most prolific and longest serving official war artists of the Second World War, yet Anthony Gross (1905-84) remains an obscure name among 20th century British talents.

More than £730,000 worth of pictures changed hands at Edinburgh saleroom Lyon & Turnbull’s (25/20% buyer’s premium) recent sale of Scottish art.

Algernon Newton (1880-1968) is one of those British artists whose pictures went unnoticed for many years.