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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.

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Last week’s Old Master sales in London provedonce again, that good Old Masters in an excellent state of preservation and fresh to the market make very solid prices.
The pick of the bunch were definitely at Christie’s where the evening sale made £45M as opposed to Sotheby’s comparatively paltry £17.2M. In fact, the tiny pen and ink study of the Head of a Bear by Leonardo da Vinci, which sold at Christies for £8.857M made half the whole of the Sotheby’s evening sale on it’s own. My stand-out lots at Christie’s were first the exquisite Music Lesson by Frans van Mieris, on panel made out from a small arched-top painting to a larger rectangle by the artist himself, which, at £3.5M indicated that no-one was put off by the alteration to its shape. Second was the magnificent large View of Verona by Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto’s nephew, which took £10.575M. My third choice was the very rare canvas of Saint Andrew by the French follower of Caravaggio, Georges de la Tour. This made a very respectable £4M. I don’t know how many paintings by this rare master are still in private hands, but it will be a tiny number. The only disappointment to my mind was the beautiful Lawrence portrait of Richard Meade, which sold for £598K, within the estimate but not a true reflection of its worth.
Sotheby’s was not such a rosy picture, with 21of the 50 paintings not finding a buyer on the night. The large Turner sea piece of 1808 made £4.79M with premiums, but had recently been on the market for £8M. The Willem Kalf still life made £1.46M despite being in rather worn condition.
One of my particular favourites was the luscious View of Port Louis in Mauritius, by William Hodges, R.A. in oil on paper. Hodges is famous for accompanying Captain Cook to the South Pacific and painted the only portrait of him from life. This canvas made a healthy £189,000.

 

By Dave Dallas, Old Master Specialist

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Image 0125 George Frederick Harris

I was recently asked by a collector friend in New York to do some research on the American painter G F Harris. All I had to go on were his initials. I subsequently discovered he is called Gregory Frank Harris, was born in 1953 and paints pretty girls by the sea in an accomplished latter-day Impressionist style.
However, before I discovered his true identity, I stumbled on a 19th century Welsh painter George Frederick Harris, who was born in Birmingham on October 30^th 1856, but lived most of his life in Merthyr Tydfil. Merthyr was an unlikely place for a would-be artist in the Victorian age as it was a town with strong coal mining roots, but it was prosperous and this led to it having a large Jewish community. In fact, it had its own Synagogue and the pink opaline glass lamps from this building are now in the collection of the St Fagan’s National Museum of History, Cardiff.

Queenie
Rolf Harris

George Frederick Harris was a decent portrait and still-life painter, I don’t know how successful he was but there are over 40 paintings by him in public art collections. In 1920 he left Wales for Australia but sadly died of pneumonia in Sydney 4 years later.
His artistic legacy, however, lives on in his grandson, Rolf. Rolf entertained many children in the UK in the 1960s with his broad-brush painting technique, singing to himself on live British television and painting briskly with a decorator’s brush. The seemingly random first strokes then turned into a cabin amongst palm trees or whatever. The trick was to try and work out what the subject was before he finished the painting.
In 2005, he painted a portrait of H.M. The Queen. Now he is detained at her displeasure. You never know what you are going to unearth when you start a little gentle research.

Girls on a beach

By Dave Dallas, Old Master Specialist

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Sotheby’s Old Master Sale, which ended on April 28th, produced a total of just over £2m which is a fair reflection on the dullness of the things on offer. There were the usual unwanted portraits, swooning saints and boers carousing.

However, the picture that stood out for me, and to be fair, to Sotheby’s, as it was picked as one of their 5 highlights of the sale, was an atmospheric view of Santa Maria della Salute seen from the lagoon by David Roberts, R.A..

I have always loved oil sketches done on the spot and this one is painted in very thin oil paint, more like a watercolour technique on paper laid down on panel. When an artist is trying to catch the play of light across a landscape, or in this case, the sea, it necessitates working at speed and the beauty of this is that the artist does not have time to conform to the conventions of his day. Roberts was the son of a shoemaker from near Edinburgh and such was his facility for drawing architecture that he was known as the Scottish Canaletto.

You would never guess this David Roberts was painted in the 1850s. It is timeless, which is why, despite being only 12 ½ x 21 ins, it made over £32,000. Quite rightly!

David Roberts, R.A. (1796-1864)
Venice, a view of the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute
Oil on paper21 x 121/2 ins

Below is a plein-air (outdoor) oil sketch by Jean Honoré Fragonard done in the 1760s, which looks like a 20th Century work of art.

Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806)
Mountain Landscape at Sunset, c. 1765
Oil on paper
Approx. 8 ½ x 13 ins

by David Dallas, Old Master Specialist

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This article is for those of you who missed the webinar about how I met the FBI.
Twenty years ago when I worked for Johnny Van Haeften in his Duke Street, St James’s Gallery, we became friendly with one of the top guys in the Art Squad.  One day we got a call from him asking us if we could help. Two colleagues in the Danish Art squad, who had been working undercover in Eastern Europe posing as dishonest collectors, were rumbled by the thieves and murdered.  It transpired that when they were confronted with the stolen paintings, they handled them in a very timid, unconvincing way.
So we were asked to give a demonstration to about 20 members of Interpol on how to handle a painting, what to look for and how to pass oneself off as a connoisseur.  Somehow the FBI got to hear of this and asked if they could send two operatives as well. Of course we said “yes” and a husband and wife team of FBI agents duly arrived with the European contingent.
We started by showing them what sturdy things pictures really are, whether they are painted on canvas, panel or copper, they don’t need to be handled with kid gloves.  We didn’t exactly throw the pictures at them, but we let them hold them and pass them around to one another.

The agents were mildly surprised that Johnny and I started examining the pictures by looking at their reverse side first.  We pointed out that Old Master paintings (those painted before 1800), often have collection seals made of sealing wax glued to the panel or stretcher, if it is a painting on canvas.  These seals are the clue to the provenance or history of the painting.  King Charles I even branded the panels in his collection with the royal cypher CR!  In the case of 19^th Century paintings, the reverse can often reveal inscriptions and signatures of the artists and 20^th Century paintings are very likely to have Exhibition labels glued to the stretcher or frame and these too, can be clues to provenance and also add glamour and prestige to a painting if a label shows it has been exhibited in a major public art gallery.

We also taught them to look at the frames and try to determine what materials they are made of.  If the frame is made of carved wood and then gilded in 24 carat gold leaf, which are very expensive materials, the implication is that this is a painting that someone thought highly of in the past and you should take it seriously, too.
Finally, we turned to the front of the pictures.  We showed our pupils that before we looked at the surface under a magnifying glass, we took in the whole picture to see how well the composition works. Then came the magnifying glass.  If a criminal is watching you whilst you handle the magnifying glass, you have to wield it in a believable manner. You can’t just randomly explore the surface. Johnny and I showed them that we were looking for two things under magnification.
We would look at various different parts of the painting to see how well executed the details were and at the same time, we could determine the condition of the paint layer.  Historic restoration can leave the surface abraded, as the action of wiping a solvent on a rag or cotton wool swab across the paint causes friction and a cleaning solvent that can dissolve old varnish can dissolve paint too.  Original condition is crucial to the value of a painting and any true connoisseur would know that.
The final tool one needs to know about, especially when determining condition, is the Ultra Violet lamp. All experts carry one.  They are just as useful for examining porcelain or furniture as they are for paintings.  They only work in a darkened room.
When you bombard a painting with UV light it gives off a slightly green haze, but any later paint, such as restoration to a damage, shows up black. It gives you a very precise indication of condition.
We showed them how dirty varnish fluoresces turquoise and how to assess what proportion of the surface is new paint.  There then followed a lively session of Q and A and we and the cops parted as good friends. The FBI visited us whenever they were in London.
If you are going to pass yourself off as a connoisseur you have to be confident. So whatever you do, as an undercover cop, when handling a painting do it with brio and you might just live to tell the tale.
To show how tough paintings are I am reminded of a wonderful vignette that took place in New Bond Street one mid-July afternoon in the 1970s.

The last Old Master sale of the season had just taken place at Sotheby’s and a dealer called Raymond Romari had bought a large Flemish landscape on a piece of wavy copper. As chance would have it, New Bond Street was being re-tarmacked and when Raymond stepped out on to the sunny street, he had an idea. In those days, there was a news stand on the street outside Sotheby’s and you had to pay for the Evening Standard then.
Raymond bought two copies and flagged down the driver of the steam roller. He asked him if he would mind driving over his picture! He said he would be delighted to do so. As a small crowd gathered round, Raymond laid one open copy of the Evening Standard on the tarmac, placed the copper panel face down and the second copy of the Evening Standard on top of it. To cheers from the crowd, he waved the steamroller forward. When it had finished its manoeuvre, Raymond had a perfectly flat picture and no paint loss. I think he might have been lucky that he got away with it! Don’t try this at home!

By David Dallas, Old Master Specialist

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Although the pandemic has had a negative impact on the way the auction rooms in London gather consignment, prices were strong and the sell-through rate was very acceptable.  Traditionally, the majority of lots tend to journey in from Continental Europe but with specialists unable to travel, all inspections have had to be done on-line. There is only so much you can determine from a jpeg and unfortunately an accurate or definitive idea of condition is almost impossible to establish.

Jan Davidsz. De Heem. A banquet still life. Oil on canvas. 5’1” x 6’11”
Lot 10, Christie’s, 15th December 2020
Price Realized: £5,766,000 with premium

As numbers of lots are down, turnover is too. Christie’s offered 44 lots in their evening sale and Sotheby’s a meagre 27, compared to a normal year when 50+ would have been offered. The total for Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams in December was £39.2, just over 1/3 of the total for 2018.

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Salvator Mundi. Tempera and oil on panel. 13 1/8” x 9 3/8”
Lot 21, Christie’s, 15th December 2020
Price Realized: £2,182,500 with premium

However, prices were strong and the sell-through rate was very acceptable. The top lots at Christie’s was a sumptuous banquet still-life by Jan Davidsz. de Heem, which sold for £4.8M (hammer), a record for the artist and a record for any still-life by an Old Master. Another record price was the £1.8m (hammer) paid for a beautiful Salvator Mundi painted by Michelangelo’s master Domenico Ghirlandaio, which was in pristine condition. Sotheby’s sold a massive canvas measuring 4’ 8” x 8’ 9” of a wine harvest by David Teniers the Younger for £3M (hammer). This picture had not been seen in public for 140 years and proves that freshness to the market adds a premium of its own.

David Teniers. The Wine Harvest. Oil on canvas. 56 x 105”
Lot 12, Sotheby’s, 10th December 2020
Price Realized: £3,645,000 with premium

This year has got off to a challenging start in the art auction world, with Old Master specialists suffering from travelling restrictions, but if 2020 is anything to go by, there will be a healthy appetite for whatever they can glean and garner.