Pictures outstrip estimates

Over £50,000 of pictures were sold at the second Fine Art Auction of the year held at the Lincoln Auction rooms.
The evening was particularly well attended with large numbers of bidders in the room, several telephone lines booked for the most sought-after lots and keen live bidding on the Internet.

Enthusiastic and knowledgeable bidding by collectors and galleries ensured many of the lots in this international sale outstripped their estimates.

The two highest achieving pictures were an oil on canvas titled ‘A Lady in Oriental Costume’ by Walford Graham Robertson (1866-1948) and Steven Townsend’s watercolour ‘Cheetahs’, which both sold for £2,600 in the sale at Golding Young & Mawer in May. The former was consigned by a local collector and was bought by a London gallery bidding over the Internet; the latter sold to a telephone bidder competing with others in the room.

The sale started with a landscape watercolour by Peter de Wint (1784-1849) of cattle, geese and a lady washing clothes beside a river which sold for £1,650 to a buyer in the room, whilst a watercolour of a Pomeranian by Nicolas II Huet (1770-1828), signed and dated 1819, was keenly contested by four telephone bidders to sell to a London gallery for £2,400.

A watercolour and gouache painting titled ‘Wild Flowers and Fence’ by the New Zealand artist Frances Mary Hodgkins (1869-1947) sold to a collector from New Zealand for £2,400.

Among the pictures by local artists, an oil on board by the Cleethorpes-born artist Peter Arthur Brannan (1929-1994) titled ‘Flowers in a Blue Jug’, signed and dated 1993, sold to a collector from the Newark area for £420. Brannan lived in Newark for thirty years and was a president of the Lincolnshire and South Humberside Artists.

In a section of pictures depicting scenes of Lincolnshire and those by county artists, four screen prints by the pre-eminent British twentieth-century artist John Piper (1903-1992) made particularly high prices. Depicting Harlaxton Manor, near Grantham, the screen prints had been entered into the sale by a collector from Stamford.

Two of the screen prints were bought by the same London collector – ‘Harlaxton (blue)’, dated 1977, sold for £2,000 and the 1977 limited edition titled ‘Harlaxton through the Gate’ made £2,300.
A signed oil on canvas by George Turner (1843-1910) titled ‘Gathering the Golden Grain’ sold for £1,100.

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