Antiques Trade Gazette 31


...but some of it is


Dean, it was deemed unlikely to make the £1m-plus sums seen last summer for the artist, as the £400,000-600,000 estimate indicated. A two-way telephone competition


took it to £750,000 – the highest auction price yet for a Spencer landscape – and the successful bidder was also a European private buyer. As is often the case with these Mod


Brit auctions, the largest contribution to the total came from Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976), who supplied seven works for Christie’s evening sale. Having said that, bidding was a bit mixed, with six of them selling for a combined £2.95m, but only two going over low estimate. The most expensive among them was


Industrial Landscape; Stockport Viaduct from 1958, a classic Lowry urban vista estimated at £1.2m-1.8m. The 20in x 2ft (51 x 61cm) signed oil on canvas was not the largest Lowry panorama ever seen and it sold below estimate at £1.1m to a UK private buyer. Christie’s day sale on May 24 offered


figurative works). The noted British feminist and


Conservative MP for Islington East Thelma Cazalet-Keir bought it the year it was painted and it was consigned to Christie’s


from her family. Nowadays it is Spencer’s figurative


works which are most sought after and so, although this was an attractive view from the path off Long Lane in Cookham


a further 15 Lowrys, which were led by Cowles Fish & Chips, Cleator Moor, a pencil and coloured crayon on blue paper which took £120,000 against a £60,000- 80,000 estimate. Again selling to a UK private buyer, it set an auction record for a work on paper by the artist.


continued on page 32 Laing in the driving seat at a record £320,000


A COUPLE of pieces of British Pop Art created a few waves at Christie’s 20th century British and Irish art evening sale. AA D (Racing Car) by Gerald Laing


(1936-2011) was a 4ft 8in x 7ft 1in (1.42 x 2.16m) oil on canvas and was deemed a bold interpretation of American drag- racing by the Newcastle-born artist who followed in the footsteps of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. However, Laing did not use


photographic techniques to transfer images onto the canvas for these works and some buyers, especially those not willing to pay multi-million-pound sums, look instead to Laing’s finer brushwork. This picture had, in fact, been offered


only a year ago at a sale at Shannon’s auctioneers in New York, where it made a premium-inclusive $79,950 (£51,250). Sold to a North American buyer who


was the vendor here, it reappeared at Christie’s in London with a £60,000- 80,000 estimate. Drawing a fervent bidding


competition with three dealers in the room still in contention over £200,000, it was finally sold to an anonymous


Above: AA D (Racing Car) by Gerald Laing – a record £320,000 at Christie’s.


buyer on the phone at £320,000 – three times higher than any previous work by Laing has made at auction. At the same sale was Joe Tilson’s


(b.1928) oil painting 21st, another large-scale work from the 1960s that came from a major series of painted


constructions made of canvas, board and panel. It sold on the low end of its punchy £120,000-180,000 estimate, but nevertheless still doubled the previous high seen for the artist at auction.


Alex Capon


galleries@ antiquestradegazette.com


Above: We Went to Miss Carter’s for Tea by Helen Bradley, 16 x 20in (41 x 51cm) oil on canvas laid on board, signed and with a fly insignia, from a UK private collection – a five-figure sum from MacConnal-Mason.


Is Bradley the heir to Lowry?


Anna Brady reports


NAÏVE is a tricky term with which to label an artist’s style, but it’s hard to think of a more apt word when it comes to the work of L.S. Lowry (1887-1976) and Helen Bradley (1900-79), despite the fact that both had formal art education. Both were born on the outskirts


of Manchester and they met at the Saddleworth Art Group where Lowry encouraged Bradley to paint. Both took their inspiration from the people and industrial towns of their native North West. The nostalgic appeal of their pictures has seen the value of their work soar at auction over the past decade. Bradley’s work is far brighter, in


both palette and mood, than Lowry’s; it does not yet fetch quite the sort of prices of his work, but she has become increasingly favoured and is now appearing more and more frequently in the galleries of those known as Lowry specialists. One such gallery is MacConnal-


Mason at 14 & 17 Duke Street in St James, London, who from June 13 to July 10 will be holding a selling exhibition titled Helen Bradley – A Very Personal Collection. The show features a collection


formed in the early 1970s by a private American collector who became close friends with the artist – an early fan as although Bradley trained as an architect she didn’t start painting until she was 65, to show her grandchildren what life was like when she was a child. David Mason, chairman of


MacConnal-Mason, says that in his 56 years of dealing, “I have rarely seen so many exemplary works in one collection”. The show includes 19 paintings,


some from other collections, and prices range from £18,000 to £120,000. Contact 0207 8397693 www.macconnal-mason.com


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