Painted in 1902, Shipwrights’ Workshop depicts two carpenters hard at work in the docks.
The 22in x 2ft 5in (55 x 74cm) oil on canvas had once hung in the Queen’s Hotel in Penzance, which was known for its large and impressive collection of Newlyn School art. It was eventually sold off in London for an unknown price alongside the rest of the collection at Messrs Phillips in 1984.
Some 15 years later, the picture turned up at Christie’s, where it sold for a premium-inclusive £10,925.
Estimated at £20,000-30,000 in David Lay’s sale, the 22in x 2ft 5in (55 x 74cm) work sold into a Cornish collection for £22,000.
Tayler was a convert to the ‘square brush technique’, and found fame in the 1880s for his Newlyn interiors, inhabited by gossiping girls sewing, trying on dresses or reading to one another.
At auction, however, his current record stands at £600,000 for his 1907 oil of a cricket match between Kent and Lancashire, a famous commission for Kent County Cricket Club. It sold at Sotheby’s in June 2006.
