Oil, Acrylic paintings & Mixed Media

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Drawing interest from the US was a portrait of a fierce-looking Scottish laird by John Pettie (1839-93).

A painting by one of Picasso’s mistresses drew considerable interest at Halls (20% buyer’s premium) of Shrewsbury on February 6.

An oval oil portrait painted by the Chinese artist Spoilum (fl.1785-1805) depicting Captain George Delanoe, a 1st Lieutenant and Commander of HMS Repulse, drew fervent interest at Mellors & Kirk's latest sale in Nottingham.

Among the prominent sitters for the Austrian artist Wilhelm Viktor Krausz (1878-1959) was Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.

Works by two artists who made the ocean their muse were the focus of a small collection at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (21% buyer’s premium) on January 29.

A painting by Scottish artist Dorothy Johnstone (1892-1980), executed near the peak of her career in 1921 made £3250 at Edinburgh saleroom Franklin Browns (15% buyer’s premium).

This inter-war ‘English school’ portrait of a seated gentleman wearing a bow tie, bought for around £150 three decades ago, sold for an unexpected £7600 at Charterhouse (21% buyer’s premium) on January 17. The unfinished 4ft 2in x 3ft 4in (1.27 x 1.01m) oil was dated 1922 but unsigned.

The £140,000 record-breaking Cedric Morris lower painting at Chichester saleroom Henry Adams (plus 20% buyer’s premium) was not the only work by an artist-plantsman to feature in the January 17 sale (see ATG No 2377 for more on that Morris result).

An English School painting depicting one of the earliest venues in cricket was knocked down at £14,000 in a Winchester auction.

Greenslade Taylor Hunt’s (19.5% buyer’s premium) first sale of the year got off to a bright start with a Singaporean painting sailing to £19,000.

Whitford Fine Art from London is a long-standing BRAFA stalwart (understandably given that the gallery’s core stock is work by 20th century Belgian and international artists).

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

This unfinished oil sketch of a tree was kept by pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) until his death and sold in his last major studio sale, held in 1926 at Christie’s.

The Dutch animal painter Paulus Potter (1625-54) succeeded in producing about 100 paintings before he died at the tender age of 28 from tuberculosis.

Woolley & Wallis celebrated its 10th £1m-plus lot last week, selling a portrait by Chinese contemporary artist Yang Fei Yun (b.1954) for £1.7m (plus premium). The sitter – the artist’s wife pictured in the early days of their marriage – was in Salisbury to watch the sale.