Art Market

Among the top lots at Christie’s (25/20/13.5% buyer’s premium) trio of Old Master sales during ‘Classic Week’ was a rediscovered oil sketch by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) for 'The Distribution of the Eagle Standards'.

At an uncertain time bidders are assertive when the best and not the rest comes up at auction.

An interior scene by one of the lesser-known members of the Camden Town Group shone in a Modern and Post War British Art sale at Chiswick Auctions (25/12% buyer’s premium) in west London on April 16.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales below £900, including a watercolour view of Cliveden House.

“Such is the wealth of East Anglian artists I don’t think there is another region in the UK that can compete. The Cornish tradition comes close, but it goes back only 100 years – the East Anglian tradition goes back way longer.”

Three oils by the popular East Anglian artist Edward Seago (1910-74) sold for £44,000 hammer at Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) in a mammoth four-day sale held at its Sussex saleroom.

An early illustration by the ‘Glasgow Girl’ Jessie Marion King (1875-1949) emerged as one of the high points of a Decorative Arts: Design from 1860 sale at Edinburgh saleroom Lyon & Turnbull (25/20% buyer’s premium) on April 3.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales below £1300, including a child portrait by James Leakey (1775- 1865), an artist known best for his miniatures.

This Thomas Sidney Cooper (1803- 1902) cattle landscape resurfaced at an auction in Leominster after a century in the same collection.

A watercolour of Lindisfarne Priory off the Northumberland coast sold for more than 12 times its guide at Taunton saleroom Greenslade Taylor Hunt (19.5% buyer’s premium).

A drawing by the Indian artist Francis Newton Souza (1924- 2004) which he created on the verge of finding international fame in the 1950s drew intense bidding at a recent Dreweatts (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) auction.

Flemish Old Masters and Modern works combined to boost takings at two spring sales held north and south in England.

After abandoning his early career as a contributor to Punch and the Illustrated London News, Myles Birket Foster (1825-99) went on to establish his reputation as a painter of technically skilled and highly polished watercolours, depicting landscapes and rustic subjects from Scotland to the Mediterranean.

The financial highlight at Lyon & Turnbull’s (25% buyer’s premium) inaugural Modern Made auction at the Mall Galleries in London was provided by an auction record for Malaysian Modernist painter and poet Abdul Latiff Mohidin (b.1938).

British art historian Frances Spalding on how a post-war buying spree by councils aimed to bring the latest works to the classrooms.

This headstone design of a female nude by the controversial sculptor Eric Gill (1882-1940) was deemed too risky to be realised when he designed it in 1933.

Two versions of Edward Bawden’s (1903-89) famous 'Brighton Pier' linocut came up at UK auctions within a day of each other.

Once enthusiastic buyers on the art market, today’s cash-strapped councils have taken on the role of vendor, pushed in an age of austerity to sell their collections and other assets to balance the books.

This 19th century painted photograph of an Indian maharaja was the stand-out picture in Sworders’ (23% buyer’s premium) dispersal of the Chelsea home of the late Henry Wilson – a World of Interiors photographer who died in a bicycle accident in 2017.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales under £1300, including an Albert Goodwin view of Whitby.