Art Market

This painting of a fire in north London drew heated bidding when it went under the hammer at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (21% buyer’s premium).

Works on paper, not oil paintings, stole the show at Lawrences (22% buyer’s premium) of Crewkerne.

Modern and contemporary British art racked up £195,000 at a Roseberys (23% buyer’s premium) sale, with 80% of the 252 lots sold.

This painting of a saint sold for a multi-estimate £5400 at London Auctions (22% buyer’s premium) in Chiswick.

Traditional ‘country house style’ pictures were in plentiful supply at a two-day sale at Tennants of Leyburn.

An 1894 pencil drawing of a street in Antwerp by Walter Frederick Osborne (1859-1903) was among the last contents offered at auction from West Horsley Place, the Grade I-listed mansion in Surrey owned by historian and broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne.

Art by a pair of 20th century artists who actively avoided belonging to any artistic school or movement stood out in recent US auctions.

A pastel portrait of a fashionable young Georgian woman in an ostrich feather hat and blue coat with her dog topped the picture section at Lincolnshire saleroom Golding Young & Mawer (20% buyer’s premium).

A reminder of the dramatic drop in demand over recent decades for Victorian landscapes was evident in Gloucestershire where two such oils by Sidney Richard Percy (1822-86) went under the hammer.

A small painting by Scottish artist Robert Gemmell Hutchison (1855- 1936) took a mid-estimate £6000 at Surrey saleroom John Nicholson’s (24% buyer’s premium).

An extensive collection with Astor family provenance offered at auction was billed as best of its type in more than 20 years.

Paintings by lesser-known Pre-Raphaelites took the honours at the latest Victorian art sales held at Sotheby’s (25/20/12.9%) and Christie’s (25/20/12.5%).

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.

The traditional Christmas Old Master series in London provided the first test of the market since the spectacular sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in New York three weeks before.

Art assembled by Peter Mangold, the late political historian, led a strong line-up of Modern British pictures at Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) in Salisbury.

The so-called ‘Great Bardfield Artists’, named after the Essex village where a community of painters and designers lived from the 1930s onwards, has become fertile ground for local auction house Sworders (22% buyer’s premium).

“Modern British sculpture is making extremely good money at the moment – it is a market moving as quickly, if not slightly quicker, than paintings.” So said Philip Smith, department head of Mallams (20% buyer’s premium).