Drawing

THE first afternoon session of a January 20-21 antiques sale held by Lawrences of Crewkerne presented more than 400 lots of books, amongst them a good collection of private press books featuring the wood-engraved illustrations of David Jones.

SOLD for £25,000 at Sotheby’s on June 25 was a group of letters, documents and sketches by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, or Il Guercino [the ‘Squinter’], his painter nephew, Benedetto Gennari and his patron Claudio Bertazzoli, that relate to the former’s altarpiece for Santa Maria della Pieta dei Teatini in Ferrara – The Purification of the Virgin.

TURN the clock back some 30 years, and regulars to Bonhams’ Knightbridge rooms might just recall a rather dapper, pinstripe-suited auctioneer by the name of Alexander Meddowes.

HIGHLIGHT of Sotheby’s (23.92/14.35% buyer's premium) book and manuscript sale on June 30 was Antonin Artaud’s 1947 portrait of his publisher Alain Gheerbrant, pencil, 14 x 20in (35 x 50cm), seen right, that made a double-estimate €210,000 (£140,000) to set a record for an Artaud drawing.

THE pencilled Assumption (with white highlights), 20 x 15in (50 x 37cm), shown right, turned up at Doutrebente on June 25 with a €4000 estimate.

WITH London’s Master Drawings week looming in July, specialist dealers were predictably out in force to contest this long-lost François Boucher (1703-1770) drawing which re-emerged at the Oxford rooms of Mallams (15% buyer’s premium) on May 7.

ALEXANDER Walker, who died last year at the age of 73, was the film critic of London’s Evening Standard for more than 40 years and among the well-known names in the film world. Not so well known is that he was a noted collector of modern art.

RECENT auctions held by Pacific Book Auctions have tended to be driven to a large extent by absentee bidding and by those using the ‘Real-Time Bidder’ internet option, but for a March 25 sale devoted to one man’s collection of letters, photographs, drawings and other mementoes relating to the life of William Randolph Hearst, those old fashioned habits of turning up in the room or even just picking up a telephone were dusted off.

ON the same day as Whyte’s Dublin sale, the Irish theme continued this side of the water at Essex when Sworders (15 per cent buyer’s premium) offered a drawing by Sir William Orpen (1878-1931) at their Stansted Mountfichet rooms on April 29 – a 16 by 14in (40 x 35cm) signed pencil and coloured washes piece entitled The Furniture Painter.

THE Italian painter Pietro Annigoni (1910-1988) is forever associated in English minds with his dramatic 1955 portrait of The Queen, which now hangs in The National Portrait Gallery and which still has plenty of admirers, including HM herself.

UK: SIR Alfred James Munnings proved as great a magnet as ever at Sotheby’s South’s Billingshurst rooms on July 18 when a watercolour sketch for one of his oil paintings fetched a hammer price of £62,000, more than double the low estimate.

UK: IN 1905, the Leicester Galleries, regular show place for Arthur Rackham R.W.S. (1867-1939) introduced Rackham to J.M. Barrie and as they say, the rest is history.

A pencil drawing by Bronzino (1503-72) earned Fr10.6m (£960,000) at Piasa on November 20, the highest ever price for an old master drawing in Paris, and a world record for a Bronzino drawing.

THE second week of London’s prestige midsummer sales saw the Modern given way to the traditional with a flurry of exceptional prices for Old Master paintings and drawings and Renaissance works of art.

UK: ONE of the most important drawings to appear at auction in London will be put up for sale at Christie's on July 4.