Fine Art

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Sotheby’s sale of 80 pieces of memorabilia relating to Lord Horatio Nelson featured a return to the saleroom of many lots acquired by the ‘Princely’ vendor in 2005.

One outcome of Master Drawings New York’s expansion to take in paintings and sculpture as well as works on paper is the inclusion this year of Tomasso Brothers Fine Art, specialist in sculpture and works of art.

For Master Drawings New York this year, London dealer Martyn Gregory is focusing on one female artist and her output during her extensive (and, for the time, very intrepid) travels around the world.

Donations to museums via inheritance tax schemes grew 22% in the past year, according to the latest Arts Council annual report.

Used as the catalogue cover design for an Illustration Art sale held by Swann (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) of New York was the George Lepape watercolour, ‘Après la Tempeste’ shown below.

The picture dealer element of BRAFA is substantial, but increasingly these days the emphasis is on works from the 19th century onwards, be they Impressionist and modern or post-war and contemporary art.

BRAFA has long been a fair with a speciality in early (medieval and Renaissance) works of art, which is something that dates back to the years when it was a Belgian National fair in the city centre. It thus serves a venerable collecting tradition drawing in buyers from the local area and further afield.

He was among the most prolific and longest serving official war artists of the Second World War, yet Anthony Gross (1905-84) remains an obscure name among 20th century British talents.

More than £730,000 worth of pictures changed hands at Edinburgh saleroom Lyon & Turnbull’s (25/20% buyer’s premium) recent sale of Scottish art.

A painting by Rex Whistler (1905-44) which was believed to be the last he painted before he was killed during the Second World War sold at Chiswick Auctions (25/12% buyer’s premium) in London.

Algernon Newton (1880-1968) is one of those British artists whose pictures went unnoticed for many years.

A retrospective of William Tillyer (b.1938) running at Bernard Jacobson this month is only the first in a series of events planned relating to the British artist at the Duke Street gallery this year.

Roy Bolton is cofounder of Sphinx Fine Art, an Old Master and Russian pictures specialist on Kensington Church Street in London.