Art Market

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales at £700 or under, including social history scenes.

Landscape painter Sidney Richard Percy (1821-86) is described in Christopher Wood’s Dictionary of Victorian Painters as “a prolific and variable painter, and his prices vary accordingly”.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales at £750 or under, including an oil by designer known more for Arts & Crafts jewellery and furniture.

Somerset auction shows how bidders are very sensitive to how works are estimated.

One notable consequence of the growing prevalence of charity shops on the high street is that auctioneers are receiving more and more items that these organisations want to check in case they are valuable.

It may be a well-rehearsed refrain, but the Old Master market is much more subject to vagaries of supply than demand. Almost without fail, when high-quality fresh material is offered, bidders will come. Just getting it in the first place is the hard part.

Christie’s highest price for an Old Master this summer came in the stand-alone Masterpieces from a Rothschild Collection sale on July 4.

While the vast majority of works at Old Master sales are by European artists, an unusual offering at Bonhams’ sale on July 3 was a Latin American work by a painter with Afro-Caribbean ancestry.

Eanger Irving Couse oil painting of Native American is his first work to be offered in a British saleroom.

The Flemish post-Impressionist Emile Claus (1849-1924) embraced the prevailing taste for plein-air painting when he moved to the village of Astene by the river Lys in 1883.

In a relatively short period from 1959-64, the Spanish-Italian Realist Xavier Bueno (1915-79) created his most recognisable works: a series of melancholic and haunting portraits of children. For Bueno these ‘Bambini’ portraits symbolised a “humiliated and oppressed humanity”.

This rare American scene by noted railway painter Terence Cuneo (1907-96) turned up at Canterbury Auction Galleries (20% buyer’s premium) in Kent.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales at £1500 or under, including a watercolour by a designer better known for Arts & Crafts jewellery.

A large canvas by the Taiwan-born British minimalist Richard Lin (1933-2011) sailed to £84,000 at Ludlow saleroom McCartneys (17% buyer’s premium), setting a house record in the process.

Tennants credited “fresh-to-market pictures with a strong provenance” as the driving force behind the notable results in its Modern and Contemporary Art sale.

After a bullish 2018 for the major Modern British art sales in London – during which Christie’s posted its strongest evening sale to date – results from the first ‘Mod Brit’ series of 2019 looked a little flat by comparison.

In what could well be a first, all 10 of Christie’s top evening sale lots on June 17 were sculptures. The group comprised the works of four blue-chip sculptors – Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink and Barry Flanagan – and contributed much of the overall total at £11.3m.

A Cricket Match (1938) by Mod Brit giant LS Lowry (1887-1976) was the fitting headliner at Sotheby’s. Offered in the midst of the Cricket World Cup, the 18in x 2ft (46 x 61cm) oil on canvas showing a back-street match played by local children in Salford sold for a mid-estimate £950,000 to a UK private buyer.

Much of the pre-sale publicity from Bonhams’ June 15 Mod Brit focused on Eric Gill’s (1882-1942) Girl with a Comb in her Hair (1928) – a market-fresh carved head and torso valued at £200,000-300,000 and admired for its unusual pose and luxuriant wavy hair.