December is an exciting month, not just because Christmas is coming, it is also the last hurrah for the Old Master Painting season in London. Sotheby’s had the better pictures and therefore, the better of the results. Their Day Sale (lesser fry) at a total of £3.34M was roughly three times the value of Christie’s at £1.185M. Furthermore, Christie’s had a large total of lots unsold on the day, 40 out of 104 lots.

The Evening Sale (the top lots) followed a similar pattern with Sotheby’s sale to talling £32.72M, with Christie’s coming in at a more modest £13.14M. In fact, Sotheby’s top lot, Titian’s ‘Venus and Adonis’, at £11.1M made almost as much, on its own, as Christie’s whole sale.

They had a beautiful still life by the Haarlem painter Floris van Dijck, very similar in composition to the painting in the Rijksmuseum and one of my favourite pictures in that collection. This made £2.09M against a pre-sale estimate of £600,000-£800,000.

Also estimated at £600,000 – £800,000 was a dramatic seascape by Ivan Konstantinov Aivazovsky titled ‘The Wrath of the Seas’. I was particularly interested to see what happened to this painting, by a 19th Century Russian artist, bearing in mind what is going on in Ukraine. On the day it made a very healthy £1.729M, proving that Aivazovsky has an international reputation and is not just for local consumption!

During the view at Christie’s, I was intrigued to speculate what would happen to two portraits, in particular. The first was a portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger, court painter to Henry VIII and the second was, to my mind, a very beautiful portrait of Henrietta Maria, by Sir Anthony van Dyck, court painter to Charles I.

In the event, they both disappointed with the Holbein making £1.12M against an estimate of £1-1.5M and the Van Dyck limping away at £2.44M against an estimate of £2-4M. The highest price was £2.92M (estimate £2-3M) for ‘Reading Party’ by the French Rococo artist Jean Francois de Troy.

These sales told us nothing new about taste for Old Masters, but they did reinforce what I said in July and that is that there is keen interest in paintings by good hands, fresh to the market and in good state. Selling lesser things, which have been seen before, is a struggle.

For the second time in two years, a good friend of mine has offered a portion of his stock for sale at one of the major London Auction Houses.

Last time around it was Rafael Valls at Sotheby’s, consigning Old Master oil paintings. I need not have fretted, all but 2 sold, but this time, it was Martyn Gregory offering British watercolours at Christie’s, a far more challenging proposition.

There are several reasons why watercolours do not chime with modern taste. The first is their fragility. We now know that light comes in particles and waves. We have always known that it generates heat and it fades watercolour pigments, if it hits them directly. This can take just a matter of a few years. They are also susceptible to attack from silverfish, if they are coated in Gum Arabic, the substance which made Osama Bin Laden’s family fortune, you may remember, and which was much used in the 19th Century by watercolourists to give depth to the colours. Silverfish love to eat Gum Arabic and when they do, it takes the pigment with it, leaving blank squiggles across the paper!

Watercolours are often painted on acidic paper and this can discolour and damage the pigments too. Furthermore, the big exhibition ‘machines’, the enormous watercolours ‘finished’ to a high degree, which the O.W.S. (Old Watercolour Society) and others produced in the early 19th Century, with a view to them holding their own, visually, when hung in exhibitions next to oil paintings, are totally out of fashion.

This is the background against which Martyn’s British Landscapes were offered. Christie’s were confident the sale would succeed and to sell 149 out of 194 lots proves them to be right. However, a closer analysis of what happened is revealing. The sale total was £559,864 including buyers’ premium, which adds nearly 34% to the hammer price. The lots averaged out at just over £3,700 each. When I was at Bonhams 10 years ago, we calculated that any lot selling for under £10,000 lost us money. (In this sale only 14 lots hit this threshold and that is including premiums) It must be the same for Christie’s. We can only speculate that they hope to get the rest of his stock in due course!

The landscapes that appealed most were wild places with dramatic stormy skies or lowering cloudy sunsets or both. The first 5 to exceed £10,000 were all Scottish scenes. Lot 5, the Turner of Oxford of Loch Torridon under a moody dawn sky was a very impressive example of this genre, as was his Sunset over Loch Coruisk on the Isle of Skye.

There was a classic harvesting scene by de Wint, painted on a warm late summer day at £15,000 and a fascinating and rare whaling scene in the Arctic by John Cleveley which made £20,000. However, despite these watercolours being well-chosen examples, in good condition, selected by an expert with a very good eye and promoted by the Christie’s International publicity machine, one came away with the feeling that British Watercolours, which were so sought after by collectors in previous decades, are somewhat passé.

In real terms most are worth a tenth of what they were 50 years ago. When will it be time for their re-assessment?

“There are too many auctions and not enough collectors”, that is how Scott Reyburn’s article in the Art Newspaper in December 2021 began. It makes rather gloomy reading for any fan of Old Masters, but it is, sadly, the truth. Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales were down 20% on the year before the pandemic (2019). If a good Old Master in excellent state comes on to the market after an absence of several decades, it will make a strong price but there are simply not enough of them.

For those of you lucky enough to have come to our champagne private view at Bonhams, you might be interested to hear what happened to the paintings we examined there. The beautiful unlined, unrestored Lawrence of Jane Allnutt with her spaniel made £150,000 hammer, which I think is less than it deserved. The early Turner watercolour of North Wales, painted in rather muted tones made £40,000 which was twice the bottom estimate. The famous racehorse, Flying Childers, however, did not fly and is still under starter’s orders.

Rather than dwell on what were basically mediocre paintings making mediocre prices, I’d like to draw your attention to a couple of surprises. There was a very fine portrait of a man attributed to Frans Hals
by Sotheby’s, which they offered with a very cagey estimate of £80,000-£120,000. The reason for their caution was that the two main experts on Frans Hals disagreed about its authenticity and the more recent
of the scholars suggested it was by his son.

Not knowing what his son’s work looks like, I thought it looked like Frans himself. I was not alone in this as it made £1.95 million!
Sotheby’s also had, like Bonhams, an early Turner, theirs too was also Welsh, but this one was in oil and South Walian. It was a view of Cilgerran Castle dated 1799 and made £1 million against an estimate of £300,000-£500,000 proving once again the magic of the Turner name. The Constables on offer had a more varied outcome mostly due to the erratic estimating.
I am into my 6th decade of looking at Old Masters professionally and I am feeling the icy blast of change. The storm of interest in NFTs is going to have a detrimental effect on the way all collectors perceive art. The young are tech-savvy and non-materialistic, so is there a subtler way of collecting than virtually? Will the virtual supersede the real?

David Oxtoby prints

If my godfather left me £5,000, I wouldn’t hesitate to spend every penny buying the suite of etchings (24), which Dave Oxtoby produced in 1974.

David Jowett Greaves Oxtoby is undoubtedly one of Britain’s greatest printmakers, as the show at the British Museum proved a few summers ago. He was one of the notorious ‘Bradford Mafia’, a group of young Yorkshire artists, who after attending the Regional College of Art in Bradford, came to London to further their education at the Royal College of Art and The Royal Academy schools. As well as Oxtoby, the group included David Hockney, Norman Stevens A.R.A, John Loker and Mick Vaughn. Before he had left the Royal Academy schools, Oxtoby had his first one man show in New York. His was and is a prodigious talent.

By the early 1970s his hands were starting to crack, and he was told that he was allergic to the acrylic paints he was using. After taking medical advice, he took up etching and what a triumph that was. In collaboration with J.C. Editons he produced a suite of 24 immensely complicated, in some cases, 4 colour, etchings. I have the good fortune to own a set of artist’s proofs.

In 1974 I worked for Alex Postan Fine Art and was entrusted with getting publicity for the show of etchings, which included watercolours and acrylics as well as prints. It was the easiest job I have ever had. Marina Vaizey wrote a half page review of it in The Telegraph, Bill Packer, a half page in the Financial Times and it was in the list of the 10 best things to do this Christmas in London in the Daily Express. Rod Stewart came to the private view. Oxtoby went on to exhibit with the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street in the 70s where the private views would sell out. Elton John bought Oxtoby’s canvases in vast numbers, for prices that were somewhere between Hockney and Picasso. He is still with the Redfern.

He has had more than 50 solo exhibitions and taken part in more than 70 group shows, yet for much of the last 30 years has lived like a recluse and kept all his latest work from public scrutiny. The result of this has had an adverse effect on the value of his work.

Oxtoby has not had the recognition for the brilliance of his draftsmanship and use of colour from the establishment that his oeuvre deserves. This seems to be because his work is inspired by popular culture, pop, rock and blues music, which is considered low brow and because he works from photographs, despite knowing subjects like Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison and Roger Daltrey well.

He was 83 in January and is not in good health. The cracked hands, which turned him into a printmaker, were actually caused by misdiagnosed diabetes. What future generations will make of his work remains to be seen, but I believe he is ready for a critical re-assessment and should take his rightful place amongst the greats of late 20th/early 21st century British art.