Art Market

After abandoning his early career as a contributor to Punch and the Illustrated London News, Myles Birket Foster (1825-99) went on to establish his reputation as a painter of technically skilled and highly polished watercolours, depicting landscapes and rustic subjects from Scotland to the Mediterranean.

The financial highlight at Lyon & Turnbull’s (25% buyer’s premium) inaugural Modern Made auction at the Mall Galleries in London was provided by an auction record for Malaysian Modernist painter and poet Abdul Latiff Mohidin (b.1938).

This headstone design of a female nude by the controversial sculptor Eric Gill (1882-1940) was deemed too risky to be realised when he designed it in 1933.

British art historian Frances Spalding on how a post-war buying spree by councils aimed to bring the latest works to the classrooms.

Once enthusiastic buyers on the art market, today’s cash-strapped councils have taken on the role of vendor, pushed in an age of austerity to sell their collections and other assets to balance the books.

Two versions of Edward Bawden’s (1903-89) famous 'Brighton Pier' linocut came up at UK auctions within a day of each other.

Burne-Jones’ studio assistant shows his own artistic skills in the Pre-Raphaelite genre.

David Fulton (1848-1930) was a Glasgow painter who, like his contemporaries Gemmell Hutchison and William Marshall Brown, specialised in painting children in sentimental settings.

Consigned from a deceased estate in Oxfordshire, a loosely bound album containing nearly 100 watercolours of marine and topographical views drew multiple bids at an Oxford saleroom.

This 19th century painted photograph of an Indian maharaja was the stand-out picture in Sworders’ (23% buyer’s premium) dispersal of the Chelsea home of the late Henry Wilson – a World of Interiors photographer who died in a bicycle accident in 2017.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales under £1300, including an Albert Goodwin view of Whitby.

It was during a period of intense industrialisation that the 19th century pastoral tradition in British print making flourished.

The Old Master section of Dominic Winter’s sale on March 7 yielded multi-estimate sums for two works that were linked to major names in Renaissance and marine art.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales under £2000, including a work by Scottish painter John Maxwell.

Some areas of the secondary pictures market march to their own beat, appearing to defy the usual forces that determine value. Ancestral paintings are such a category.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906-96) was one of those artists who took little pleasure in selling their work. Indeed, Motesiczky’s obituary in The Independent described her “aristocratic disdain for the marketplace” and stated that “while she half welcomed exhibitions, they remained uncomfortable experiences… she never needed to sell her paintings, indeed she preferred to keep them around her.”

An abstract creation by the revered Singaporean artist Cheong Soo Pieng (1917-83) took £15,500 at Derbyshire saleroom Hansons (20% buyer’s premium).

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales at £1000 and below, including an oval oil head study by the Victorian painter Joshua Hargrave Sams Mann (1826-88).

A wave of fresh interest in female artists is sweeping the UK, forcing museums and galleries to rethink their displays and purchasing policies – and driving demand at dealerships and auction houses in the process.

Scottish artist Craigie Aitchison (1926-2009) painted few subjects more obsessively throughout his career than the crucifixion.