Watercolours

In a career of remarkable highs and lows, incorporating high political office, financial scandal and near bankruptcy, enormous success as a novelist and imprisonment for perjury during a libel case that he had won years earlier, Jeffrey Archer has himself been the subject of many a caricature and cartoon.

Two stand-out collections containing Old Master and traditional British works on paper were offered within 24 hours of each other in Oxfordshire.

Commander John Morton Lee OBE RN (retd.), who had a long career in the Royal Navy before turning his passion for watercolours into a dealer business, died peacefully on February 26 after a brief illness, aged 88.

Among the works that David Tunick, a longstanding MDNY exhibitor, will be showing this year at his gallery on East 69th Street is this large 18 x 14in (45.5 x 35.5 cm) watercolour over pencil by John Robert Cozens.

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.

Sporting and ornithological art collected over half a century by the Astor family will be offered in a single-owner sale during Christie’s ‘Classic Week’.

This enamel copy of Hans Holbein’s Whitehall mural portrait is by William Bone Senior (1792-1846) – second-generation member of the Bone dynasty of miniaturists and enamellists.

Leeds-born artist Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759-1817) was a self-taught artist who worked during the ‘golden age’ of British watercolour painting. And while, perhaps, his prowess did not always rival that of his leading contemporaries, James Mitchell reflects that at his best, the Yorkshireman’s work is “very pleasing”.

British and Irish watercolours piqued the interest of bidders at Tennants’ (18.5% buyer’s premium) Country House sale in Leyburn on October 14.

A near-monochrome watercolour by the Australian artist and stage designer Loudon Sainthill (1918-69) sold for five times its top estimate at Canterbury Auction Galleries (20% buyer’s premium) on October 3-4.

As part of a fifth anniversary auction at Farleigh Court Golf Club on November 1, Catherine Southon is offering the first part of an archive consigned by the family of the commercial artist and cartoonist Francis Wilford-Smith (1927-2009).

A pair of watercolours depicting Berwick-upon-Tweed, the northern-most town in England, turned up at Batemans (20% buyer’s premium) on September 2.

Mural painter, stained glass artist and landscapist, Henry Arthur Payne (1868-1940) had many talents.

Arriving in Madras in the second week of November 1792, William Daniell (1769-1837) and his uncle Thomas Daniell (1749-1840) – creators of a successful series of aquatints depicting the subcontinent – sought out fellow artist Robert Home (1752-1834).