Art Market

Wintry scenes by two local artists created a brighter picture at a recent auction in Yorkshire.

Among the most iconic works of David Hockney’s (b.1937) output was his Paper Pools series, focusing on the private Californian swimming pools he experienced in the late 1970s.

Described by one of his biographers as ‘The Last of the Norwich School’, Leonard Squirrell (1893-1979) was an East Anglian man through and through.

A view of a Tyneside street by Spennymoor mining artist Norman Cornish (1919-2014) took £5500 at local auction house Anderson & Garland (20% buyer’s premium).

It’s fair to say the work of Victorian animal painter Sidney Cooper (1803-1902) is not flavour of the month.

Plenty to interest European buyers was available at Thomaston Place Auction Galleries (17% buyer’s premium) in Maine on August 25-26.

“Isn’t it possible that the Irish could be just as brilliant in the visual arts as they have been in music and literature?”

Three modestly valued works in regional sales, all sold below £700.

A little-known Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) sculpture of the British actress Sandra Dorne took an estimate-topping £11,000 at HRD Auction Rooms (20% buyer’s premium) on the Isle of Wight.

Three modestly valued works in regional sales, sold for under £900.

Just a month after the Second World War, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was in Paris working at the lithography workshop of Fernand Mourlot (1895-1988). It was the beginning of a collaboration that would last almost three decades and produce more than 400 different graphic images and editions.

August is the month when Scotland takes it up a notch while the rest of the art world has a breather.

An Indian School work guided at £100-150 was the star turn at Greenslade Taylor Hunt (19.5% buyer’s premium) of Taunton in Somerset on August 2.

The setting for this near-monochrome self-portrait, below, by Walter Sickert (1860-1942) is the Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice and shows the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni and the Scuola Grande di San Marco.

A selection of three works from UK regional salerooms sold for £1000 or under.

Unseen on the market since 1946, a view of Sloane Square (below) by Robert Buhler (1916-89) raced to £5000 at Ewbank’s (22.5% buyer’s premium).

An intriguing portrait by an unidentified hand of a Royal Navy admiral in a wig and blue gilt braided uniform was a star entry at Cotswold saleroom Chorley’s (20/15/12.5/10% buyer’s premium).

Selling above estimate at Jacobs & Hunt (22% buyer’s premium) in Liss, Hampshire, was a life-size bronze by Sydney Harpley (1927-92) titled Umbrella Girl, below.

This watercolour, below, by Frederic Whiting (1874-1962) took a multi-estimate £2500 at Thomson Roddick’s (15% buyer’s premium) Edinburgh saleroom on August 9.

This Old Master painting, above, of The Adoration of the Magi in the manner of Italian painter Vincenzo Carducci (c.1576-1638) led a recent Dorset sale.