It was the influence of this European Modernist education that prompted Lock to found The New Group on her return to South Africa in 1938 with fellow Heatherley students Terence McCaw, Gregoire Boonzaier.
Here she became known for still-life studies and interiors inspired by Cape Town’s picturesque Dutch Malay homes and the formative influence of Van Gogh.
Peter Wilson’s (22% buyer’s premium) Northern and 20th Century Art & Design sale on February 20 in Cheshire included a typical interior scene.
In good, original condition, the signed 15 x 17½in (38 x 44cm) oil on board, dated 1946, was knocked down to a UK phone bidder at £9000 against a £5000-7000 guide. A similar interior scene depicting an identical yellow chair sold at London saleroom Roseberys in December for £10,000.
Elsewhere, a late 1950s Abstract landscape by Scottish painter William Gear (1915-97) modestly estimated at £1500-2000 attracted multiple bids including seven phone lines before it sold for £6100 to a UK bidder on thesaleroom.com.
Gear painted the work in 1959, a year after he was appointed curator of Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne. At the centre of British Abstraction in the 1950s, Gear’s work fell from favour as Abstract Expressionism and pop art came to the fore.
A major retrospective in 2015 was titled The Painter That Britain Forgot.
