32 9th June 2012 art market
modern british art sales continued from page 31
The 10½ x 14½in (27 x 37cm) picture
depicted a queue outside a local chip shop in the small Cumbria town and had been a gift from Lowry to his friend, the Reverend Geoffrey Bennett. It had, in fact, been drawn with pastels belonging to Bennett’s son, which may explain the slightly unusual yellow colouring for Lowry. At Christie’s in March 1995 it made £40,000 but, as was seen here, prices for the famous son of Salford have risen significantly since then. Over at Sotheby’s (25/10/12%
buyer’s premium) a fortnight earlier, their evening sale of Modern and post- War British art on May 10 was a slimmer 36-lot affair which saw 29 lots finding buyers (81%). As at Christie’s, there were a number
of fiercely contested lots, but there was also slightly better bidding across the board here. The hammer total of £5.1m was followed by a further £2.82m from the day sale, which meant the overall £7.92m fell within the estimate. The highlight was William Roberts’
(1895-1980) The Chess Players, shown on page 31, which took the artist into a new league commercially. The 3ft 4in x 3ft (1.02m x 92cm)
signed oil on canvas from c.1929-30 came to auction from an unnamed North
American institution assumed to be the Newark Museum in New Jersey. The estimate was set at £300,000-500,000, which reflected the previous auction high for the artist, the £380,000 seen for Masks from 1932, which sold at Sotheby’s
Evill-Frost sale. Indeed, prices for Roberts rose
significantly at that sale, but here they jumped even further as four bidders competed for The Chess Players before it was finally knocked down at £1m to
London dealer Daniel Katz. The reason for the price? As well as
being a large work containing multiple figures with Roberts’ trademark cylindrical fingers, it was the tension present in the painting, the body language and gestures
The Orient still finds a welcome shop window in the US
ALTHOUGH he spent the first 52 years of his life living and working in Belgium, Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merpres (1880-1958) is now intimately associated with Bali. It was here in 1932 that Le Mayeur first encountered the remnants of a traditional local culture, the tropical flowers and foliage, the fabled sunlight, and the exotic Indonesian women that fired his art and prolonged his stay until his death in 1958. Following his death, the home where
he lived and worked was preserved as a museum and a gallery for more than 80 of his paintings and his collection of traditional Balinese art. Many of Le Mayeur’s most popular
paintings feature legong dancers (his most famous model was Ni Nyoman Pollok, a girl he first painted as a 15-year-old in 1933 and married two years later) and they were the subject of the oil-on- canvas which surfaced unexpectedly at the Pasadena saleroom of John Moran (20% buyer’s premium) on April 17. Consigned from an estate in Claremont, California, this work descriptively titled Balinese Women Surrounded by Flower Blossoms measured 22 x 18in (55 x 45cm) and was signed to the lower left A. Le Mayeur. Estimated at $100,000-150,000, it provoked plenty of international interest (particularly in Singapore where the artist held a breakthrough exhibition of similar
Left: Industrial Landscape; Stockport Viaduct by L.S. Lowry which topped Christie’s sale – £1.1m.
Right: Cowles Fish & Chips, Cleator Moor by L.S. Lowry – £120,000 at Christie’s and an auction record for a work on paper by the artist.
Above: Street Scene, Algiers by Frederick Arthur Bridgman, $270,000 (£177,630) at John Moran.
Above: Balinese Women Surrounded by Flower Blossoms by Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merpres, $240,000 (£157,895) at John Moran.
works in 1933) and ultimately sold at $240,000 (£157,895). Typically pictures by the artist appear
in Hong Kong sales of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art where, on a number of occasions, prices for major works have passed US$1m. Frederick Arthur Bridgman (1847-
1928) was born in Alabama but is more strongly associated with the Salon in Paris where he moved as a young man, studying in the studio of pre-eminent
French Orientalist Jean-Leon Gérôme. A decade after his first trip to North Africa ‘the American Gérôme’ was at the peak of his career in 1882 when he painted the 2ft 10in x 4ft 5in (85cm x 1.32m) oil Street Scene, Algiers. The theatrically staged scene centres on a beautifully costumed woman with a young child at her skirt tails offering a drink to a man mounted on an Arabian horse. Alongside other European and
American paintings included in this sale,
it was originally owned by the South Pasadena socialite Minerva Hamilton Hoyt (1866-1945), an early champion of the California’s State Parks Commission. It came by descent in the family to
the present San Marino owners and was in good condition with no evidence of restoration under backlight. However, a $300,000-500,000 estimate did prove a deterrent. It did not quite make it that far, selling at $270,000 (£177,630). Roland Arkell
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64