Sir John Lavery and the image of tennis

2022 is not a year that anyone except the most reclusive could possibly claim not to have heard of the Australian Tennis Open – the high profile legal wranglings between the Australian Government and Novak Djokovic over his entry visa, covid vaccinations and his deportation, have made the already famous sports tournament front page news worldwide. Founded in 1905, the Australian Open, or the ‘happy slam’ as it is affectionately known, is the first of the 4 grand slam tournaments worldwide, which takes place in Melbourne every year. Although it is not the highest paid tournament (the prize money is only A$75m!), the Australian Open is by far the most popular in terms of attendance numbers, with 812,000 spectators attending the 2020 tournament.

Notwithstanding our current fascination with the dramas playing out in Oz, we, the public, have always had a fondness and affection for the game of tennis, one which is totally different to that of other sports, and one which goes back centuries to its origins. The racket sport we now call tennis, is the direct descendant of ‘real’ tennis or ‘royal‘ tennis, which continues to be played today as a separate sport with more complex rules. Most historians believe that tennis originated in the monastic cloisters in northern France in the 12th century, but the ball was then struck with the palm of the hand; hence, the name jeu de paume (game of the palm). It was not until the 16th century when rackets came into use, and the game as we know it emerged. The roots of the game are firmly linked to the royal courts of France and England, with Henry VIII of England being one of the most avid players of his day – his luxurious tennis courts still remain to this day at Hampton Court Palace. In France the sport was so firmly associated with the Court and Nobility that during the Revolution many of the tennis courts we deliberately destroyed as a sign of a new era emerging.

Subliminally these Aristocratic links and associations have remained with us into modern times. Tennis still has the perception of being a genteel sport, one which is played out on immaculate lawns on sunny summer afternoons, with players dressed in immaculate tennis whites. One only has to look at Wimbledon to confirm this – the tournament is so much more than simply a sporting occasion, it has become a firm part of London’s social season, with its Royal Box, champagne, strawberries and cream! Without doubt this image belies the seriousness of the sport, and the huge financials at stake in modern tennis, however, it is also this je ne sais quoi that also adds to its modern success.

Depictions of tennis in western art very much follow the image of tennis as a jolly, social pastime played by the leisured classes and gilded youth. The summer is always eternal, and the player are carefree without a worry in the world! One of the most brilliant and prolific painters of this subject is the Victorian artist Sir John Lavery, who is more usually associated with the glamorous and elegant society portraits he produced throughout his life. Tennis, however, fascinated him and he returned to paint the theme on a number of occasions, producing both informal studies and highly complicated compositions.

One of the earliest depictions is Lavery’s 1885 painting, Played!! which captures the movement and drama of an exciting new sport, as a young woman lunges to return serve. In the early 1880s, Lavery had returned from Paris, where he was studying at the prestigious Academie Julian, and was quickly taken by the game. In the summer of 1885, he visited the home of a friend in the suburbs of Glasgow, where a tennis court had been set up. The painting was inspired by this visit, and marked a new direction for the artist, away from his more usual society portraits towards depictions of ‘modern’ life – no doubt influenced by the Impressionist works he would have seen during his stay in Paris. His choice of the subject and naturalistic portrayal was considered extremely avant-garde at the time. Lawn tennis was then at an interesting stage in its development as a modern sport. It had emerged in the 1870s and had been inaugurated at Wimbledon as recently as 1877, when the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club introduced men’s singles championships. Ladies’ singles and men’s doubles had not been incorporated until 1884. The process by which women arrived on court was a gradual one, then, and mixed doubles matches were yet to come.

Played!! turned out to be a mere prelude to Lavery’s undoubted masterpiece on the subject which painted the same year. The Tennis Party, which is in the collection of the Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, is an absolute tour de force of a painting, showing huge sophistication of composition, movement and bravura brushwork. In spite of its apparent spontaneity the picture is not merely an arbitrary slice of life, rather it is highly constructed work aimed at giving the illusion of spontaneity. The depiction of both male and female players in the same game, which seems uneventful to a modern viewer, would have been the height of modernism at the time, where casual, real-time depictions of the opposite sexes cavorting together was very rare at the time.

Throughout his career Lavery, returned often to the subject of tennis, which more than any other sport held his fascination. Although Lavery’s first depictions of tennis might have been painted in Scotland, his later works were increasingly international showing the growing popularity of the sport. The paintings Lavery produced in the first quarter of the 20th century whilst on the French Riviera and in America are some of the most spontaneous and evocative depictions ever produced on the subject. Whether they were painted at the famous courts at the Hôtel Beau Site in Cannes – then ‘the’ place to go for well healed British holiday makers, or at the courts of the Breakers Hotel in Florida or in the private residences of Palm Beach, these paintings have a freshness and sense of movement which still have the power mesmerise to this day.

Lavery’s 1885 The Tennis Party remains, however, his most accomplished and monumental depiction of the sport, an image which, more than any other artwork has influenced our vision of what we feel tennis ‘should’ be, and it remains to this day the quintessential image of the sport.

 

 

Reflections on The Old Master Sales

“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?

My Favourite Item…The Cunha Braga Cup

Knowing that I am a picture specialist, it may come as a surprise that I have chosen this 14 cm long, ceremonial drinking vessel. It is a rock crystal masterpiece of renaissance craftmanship, carving and decoration and is my favourite piece of all time. I am not sure if I know myself why I love it so much – maybe it is because it is so tactile, almost warm to the touch, and just oozes history. It fits neatly in the palm of your hand and is beautifully made – and nearly 400 years before Carl Faberge turns up and makes anything nearly as good.

I first saw the cup in October 2006 on its preview in New York. I was previewing pictures alongside my colleague from the works of art team who was accompanying the cup. My colleague gave me some of the background to its discovery. Amazingly, he spotted it among a bunch of Polaroid shots sent over from Portugal by a client just in case there was anything of interest. Even more remarkable is that the photographs were general room shots of a room full of display cabinets all rammed with various pieces and the cup was spotted tucked in a cabinet full of undistinguished objects. He was on a plane to Lisbon the next day to see it and the rest is history. I remember he told me that at first it was thought to be a copy or later version of a similar cup in a Munich museum. However, once the two were put together side by side in the museum the curators were delighted to discover that our one was made by the same craftsman as theirs – making these two the definitive pieces and ours the only other example in the world available to buy.

It had belonged to Alfredo Baptista Cunha Braga (1869-1932) from Lisbon. He acquired it circa 1920 and then by direct descent to the owners in the auction. The piece was offered in London on 30/11/2006, the pre-sale estimate was £200,000-300,000 but it sold for an astounding £1,968,000.

 

Macklowe Collection

After 10 years of legal wrangling through the divorce courts of New York, the Macklowe Collection finally hit the auction block on November 15th.

For the warring Harry and Linda Macklowe, the sale brought some partial closure to their epic divorce battle. For Sotheby’s it represents significant market share and the highest possible Art Market profile for 2021 and 2022.
For collectors worldwide it was a truly golden opportunity to pick and choose from the most important single owner collection sale in auction history. Each and every work is a Masterwork in its own right and everything is so carefully chosen, curated and of the highest quality that it would be impossible to ever put a collection like this together again. Equally the quantity of works in the collection quite simply couldn’t be sourced or is even available. This was a landmark sale in all respects, putting aside all the couple’s endless arguments, it has rewritten the record books.

In a rapidly changing Post Lockdown Art World, this collection of Modern and Contemporary Art Masterworks re-defines the boundaries of both categories. The collection was ‘guaranteed’ to sell, it was just a matter of how much it would sell for! Having been an auctioneer myself for over 30 years I could feel the excitement even from this side of the Pond, and as we got nearer to the sale itself, collectors and advisors would have all been in a heightened state of excitement.

Each of the 65 works is a masterwork and together they constitute an unrivalled ensemble that meticulously traces the most important art historical achievements of the last 80 years.

The November 15th auction, which was held at Sotherby’s New York, featured 35 works, ranging in date from the 1940s to works painted less than a decade ago. Many artists – among them Jeff Koons, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol – are represented by multiple works, each one marking a distinct and critical moment in their respective careers, and together forming an insightful portrait of the artists’ evolution over time.

The entire group of 35 works was backed by the auction house with a guarantee and every single lot was sold, 21 lots came to the sale with ‘irrevocable bids’ and the sale total soared over its pre-sale low/high estimate expected total of between $439.4 million-$618.9 million.

This was only the first half of the 65 works in total from the Macklowes’ holdings to be auctioned off by authority of the NY Courts, the second half is to be offered in another final standalone sale devoted to the remaining works in May 2022.

The first half of the Macklowe collection sale totalled $676 million.

Here are some of my highlights:

 

 

 

If I had £5,000 to invest what would I buy?

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.

If I had £5,000 to invest what would I buy?

£5,000 to buy art – sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? It is certainly a decent chunk of change to play with – large enough to focus the mind and to open the possibility of buying something a little bit more special than a decorative wall filler. Conversely, the moment one starts looking at works in a slightly higher price bracket, and by artists who have more pedigree, suddenly £5,000 doesn’t seem that much at all! A strategy is, therefore, needed if the canny buyer is to maximise their buying power.

For me, if I had £5,000 to spend on one artwork, I would adopt a twofold approach – firstly I would look to buy as good a work on paper as I could find by an artist whose work I loved, but whose paintings are out of my reach. Secondly, in order to maximise my buying power, I would concentrate my search entirely on the auction market rather than buying from a retail gallery. Buying from auction can take a little more time, and it needs a little more research by the collector, but it often allows one to buy works considerably cheaper than retail level. As a famous supermarket says – every little helps!

The artist I would buy with my £5,000 is an artist who I think is significantly undervalued in the current market, both in terms of his talent as well as in comparison to the values many of his contemporaries achieve. Keith Vaughan is a relatively overlooked Modern British artist who was born in 1912 at Selsey Bill in Sussex. He was a self-taught artist with no formal instruction in art, yet he went onto forge a highly individualist and distinctive career which has until fairly recently has been overshadowed by the giants of his generation – Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost, Ivan Hitchens etc.

Vaughan started his career as a commercial artist when he was apprenticed at the Lintas advertising agency, from which he gained an understanding of composition and form – both essential skills in commercial art. From 1939, after he left Lintas, Vaughan became a full-time artist. With the outbreak of World War II, Vaughan declared himself a conscientious objector and joined the St John Ambulance; in 1941 he was conscripted into the Non-Combatant Corps.


During the war Vaughan formed friendships with the painters Graham Sutherland and John Minton, with whom after demobilisation in 1946 he shared premises. Through these contacts he formed part of the neo-romantic circle of the immediate post-war period. However, Vaughan rapidly developed an idiosyncratic style which moved him away from the Neo-Romantics. Concentrating on studies of male figures, his works became increasingly abstract.
Vaughan worked as an art teacher at the Camberwell College of Arts, the Central School of Art and later at the Slade School.

Throughout his life, Vaughan’s struggled with his own internal demons. Keith Vaughan was a gay man living in a time when homosexuality was illegal and actively frowned upon by Society. His struggle with his sexuality is reflected throughout his work and in his source of subject matter. Studies of figures and male nudes feature heavily in his work, although they are simplified and abstracted showing the influence of both international Modernism, Cubism his love of ballet and dance. Vaughan suffered from habitual depression and alcoholism, which eventually resulted in his suicide in 1977.

One might be forgiven for thinking that in light of all this Vaughan’s work would be negative and dour, however, this is wrong. As is often the case, personal struggles can produce works of great sensitivity and subtly. Vaughan’s work has a graphic quality that is softened by the use of a very sophisticated colour palette. They are very beautiful, elegant images.

The commercial art market has begun to reflect the increasing interest in, and appreciation of Vaughan’s work, with good examples now regularly achieving six figure sums at the auction. His works are also appearing more frequently at high end art fairs, where wall space has a commercial value, and a dealer’s decision to show a Vaughan instead of another artist is a calculated strategy, and one that reflects growing demand.

And yet, even with this increased visibility Keith Vaughan’s work is still undervalued in relation to many of his contemporaries, and it represents significant investment potential. His drawings in particular are surprisingly accessible financially and it is entirely possible to buy lovely pencil or pen and ink studies for a thousand or two, sometimes less; and more important, finished watercolours and gouaches can be bought within our £5,000 budget at auction.

How long this relative accessibility will last, I cannot say, but in my opinion now is definitely the time to buy Keith Vaughan’s work if like it and respond to it. Clearly, as always, liking an artist’s work is the primary reason for buying it, but it’s always nice to have a healthy upside too.

Sir Terry Frost, 1915-2003

To be asked to write an article about one of my favourite artists is truly a delight. Sir Terry Frost’s muse wasn’t a person but the Cornish town of St Ives. Thanks to Covid this unique seaside town with all its artistic heritage, glorious light, sights and sounds of the sea, which was for so long an inspiration for Terry, is now the ‘go to’ vacation spot for families across the UK, so hopefully current and future generations will get to see for themselves just what inspired Terry and so many other great artists over the years.

Terry was born and brought up in Warwickshire, he left school at 14 and started work locally, working mostly manual jobs with no sense that his natural artistic ability would ever make him a living. When war came he served as a regular soldier, first in France then the Middle East and Greece before joining the Commandos. While serving with them in Crete in June 1941 he was captured and sent to various prisons for the duration of the war. During his time at Stalag 383 in Bavaria, he met the painter Adrian Heath who saw Terry’s talent and encouraged him to paint. Terry later described these years as ‘a tremendous spiritual experience’, he felt that he had gained ‘a more aware or heightened sense of perception during my semi starvation.’




As soon as the war was over, Terry went to study at the Birmingham College of Art, he soon discovered the action was in London and moved down to Camberwell School of Art. By 1946 he had removed to study at St Ives School of painting for one year where he held his first one man exhibition in 1947. He continued his studies in London and Cornwall and when in 1950 he was elected a member of the Penwith Society, he made a move to St Ives in 1951. He later taught at Leeds and in Cyprus and finally settled in Banbury, Oxfordshire in 1963.
In 1960, Frost held his first one-man show in New York at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery. This exhibition was a seminal moment in his career and he said of this experience:
In New York they all came to my exhibition, de Kooning, Rothko, Klein. Newman and Motherwell all took me to their studios.

I accepted it all as normal and they accepted me. They were all painters struggling to get somewhere like I was. They worked hard; they would sleep until noon, do eight or nine hours in the studio, and then starting at eleven at night proceeded to drink me under the table! Then we’d go out at four in the morning and have breakfast at a Chinese restaurant.’

I first met Terry in the 1980’s during my early days at Christie’s, I would see him either at our auction preview ‘Drinks’ or at his shows at the Whitford gallery just around the corner in Duke Street. He was always full of fun and told great stories such as this one from his days working in the 1950’s as an assistant to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth in her studios in St Ives … Hepworth was convinced her clients would not buy her work if they knew she didn’t make everything herself, so she was understandably nervous whenever prospective clients came to visit her studios. Terry told me that whenever visits took place he and the other assistants all went down to the pub until the coast was clear. One particular day important clients were coming so Terry and the other assistants made themselves scarce in the pub as usual, expecting on their return to find the visitors long gone. However as soon they arrived back Barbara told them to hide, the clients has arrived late and were still in the house and would be coming up the path any minute now. The assistants all managed to quickly find a hiding place and Barbara began showing the clients around the garden and studio. Terry was well hidden behind a bushy tree, however he could feel all the beer was beginning to well up inside him and very soon he was going to have to pee ! He hung on and on but with the tour continuing he could hold out no longer. He couldn’t risk nipping to the loo so performed the task from his bushy hiding place thinking he had got away with it. However unknown to Terry he had unwittingly created a small river which was running swiftly down the path towards Barbara and her prospective clients, Barbara noticed the stream but luckily her clients were too busy enjoying their tour to notice and Terry got an ‘earful’ from the boss after they had gone.


Terry’s many talents were fully recognised during his long career, he was made an R.A. in 1992 and Knighted in 1998. Speaking in the 1980’s about his work he said; ‘A shape is a shape, a flower is a flower.

A shape of red can contain as much content as the shape of a red flower. I don’t see why one should have to have any association, nostalgia or evocation of any kind. It boils down
to the value of the shape and the colour.’
Terry was always making art and exploring new avenues and mediums. I went to his last London show at the Whitford Gallery to see he had totally changed his medium and had made wonderfully colourful moulded and blown glass pieces. Forever energetic and full of new ideas, Terry Frost represents all that is good and great about late 20th century British Art.

Affordable Modern Masters

View the webinar

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc5dTOMI4fw[/embedyt]

 

Download the article here

Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, Pierre Auguste Renoir are just a few of the Titans of Modern Art. They all have stellar international reputations, with their finest works being fought over by mega-collectors worldwide and making millions.

This leaves us mere mortals, who might aspire to own a work by any of these greats, without hope; the assumption being that price precludes ownership. Thus, collectors may totally discount the possibility of acquiring anything at more affordable prices.

However, there are buying opportunities out there for all of these artists which may not seem immediately obvious. When faced with astronomical prices for finished major works, collectors should be encouraged to look below the surface for less apparent opportunities…

For example, during Francis Bacon’s early career in the 1930s, he worked as a commercial furniture and rug designer. After the war he emerges as the great painter we know today, and of course his paintings are now out of financial reach to the masses. However, his rugs, although expensive, and his much cheaper surviving pieces of furniture, offer some buying opportunities, (no.’s 1-2). As do his limited-edition prints, each one is signed by him, even all three works in a Triptych, (no.’s 3-5).

Following this theme, I looked for more affordable pieces. Among my favourite finds is no. 7, Lucian Freud’s artist’s palette. It is one he actually used and still has all his signature colours. Equally, Freud’s etchings are accessible and affordable and they are a direct link to his skill as a draughtsman. The process of making an etching involves the artist drawing his subject direct onto the printing plate, and so is only one step away from an original drawing in my mind.

I think David Hockney offers us the greatest number of different buying opportunities, from faxes, to iPad drawings, to office-made, limited-edition ink jet prints and he is still finding new ways to make art, which at 83 is truly remarkable!

 

 

 

Art Lending: The Beginner’s Guide

 

 

(From COIN Private Finance working in conjunction with Doerr Dallas Valuations)

Download the article here

If you own a piece of fine art, it can be a financial asset as well as an object of pleasure. You can raise capital without selling your artwork, thanks to art lending.

Detail from Untitled (1982) by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Photograph: Sotheby’s/EPA

In this article we have worked together with COIN Private Finance to explain exactly what art lending is, who uses it and why, and the kinds of art that can be used for loans. We also talk you through how it works, step by step. If you have artworks and want to release capital without selling them, read on to find out how.

What is art lending?

Art lending is when a work of art is used as collateral for a loan. This form of lending is becoming increasingly popular as it allows art collectors to release liquidity from a painting or print, without having to sell it. The market for art-secured loans has grown consistently over the past decade and there are now an estimated US$24 billion of outstanding loans against art (according to the Deloitte Art & Finance Report 2019).

Art Finance is traditionally associated with ultra-wealthy collectors being offered loans by big private banks or auction houses. However, the market has expanded and diversified over recent years, and collectors at all levels are using their art as collateral. Anyone who owns a valuable work of art can raise finance through a boutique, specialised art lender.

Why use art lending? 

Detail from Untitled (1982) by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Photograph: Sotheby’s/EPA

There are two main reasons why collectors take out a loan against a work of fine art. The first is if a collector needs to raise finance quickly, whether to inject cash into a business or settle unexpected bills. Selling art can be a lengthy and complicated process, whereas art loans can be arranged in a matter of days. The second reason for choosing to borrow against art is to release capital for other investment opportunities, whether that’s another work of art, property or a business venture.

With the economic uncertainty brought about by Covid-19 and Brexit, taking out a loan against art has become an even more appealing proposition to collectors. A loan allows collectors to leverage their artwork while waiting for the optimum time to sell; it offers a fast route to capital, whether that’s needed to cope with unforeseen events, or to be strategically redeployed into higher-yield investments.

What kinds of art can be used for loans?

Any artwork that is likely to fare well at auction can be considered for a loan. Post-War and Contemporary works are particularly attractive as they have performed particularly well in auctions in the last few years.

Substantial loans have been taken out against works by superstars of the contemporary art scene, including a $10 million painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat. The New York prodigy received huge acclaim in the 80s, and has posthumously set auction records: in 2017, Untitled (1982) was sold at Sotheby’s for a staggering $110.5 million.

Works by the elusive British artist Banksy are also reliable assets for art-secured loans. The world’s most infamous graffiti artist has become an art market phenomenon, and his works regularly exceed auction estimates. Commercial works, such as editions of screen prints, can be authenticated with a certificate from “Pest Control” – the body set up by Banksy to verify genuine works.

At Coin, we consider fine art from all periods, from Old Masters to Contemporary. Our experts are qualified to appraise a range of works, including paintings and prints, sculpture and ceramics.

How does it work? 

As experienced art lenders, we ensure that our process is simple, transparent and discreet.

First, our art market specialists will appraise the work, and any accompanying documentation relating to its provenance, such as invoices and purchase histories.

Once the artwork has been valued, we’ll liaise with you to create a loan agreement that suits your needs and circumstances. Our typical Loan To Value (LTR) is 50-70% and we can offer terms to suit you, from just one month to one year. As we offer non-recourse loans, only the work of art itself is used as collateral and we do not run any credit checks. Once the terms are finalised, you will receive a secure loan agreement, laid out in clear terms with no hidden fees.

Following receipt of the signed agreement, we will arrange a convenient time for collection. Your artwork will be professionally handled at all times and stored in our climate-controlled facility for the duration of the loan.

Upon repayment of the loan, the artwork will be safely and securely returned to you.

Coin case studies

Damien Hirst artworks

Detail of Noble Path from Mandalas (2019) by Damien Hirst. Photograph: Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. DACS 2019.

We were approached by an Art Advisor whose client was looking to finance a property deal. The client had a private collection of Damien Hirst artworks, which is an ideal asset for raising capital quickly.

Our art experts valued the pieces and we offered the client a loan within 72 hours. The open market value of the collection was £400,000, and we were able to offer a loan value of £210,000. We agreed terms with the client: a 2% fee and 2% per month for a 3-month period. The loan was completed in just six days.

Thanks to the speed and simplicity of our process, the client was able to seize liquidity, make the property deal, and hold on to their precious Damien Hirst collection.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh furniture 

Willow Chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Willow Chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Photograph from https://www.thereviewmag.co.uk/charles-rennie-mackintosh/.

A client approached us with a piece of vintage furniture by Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The item was due to be sold at a prestigious auction house – however the sale was not due to take place for another five months.

The client needed liquidity right away, which is why they came to Coin. We organised a sale advance on the item, funding 50% of the auction mid-estimate, over the five-month period until the sale. The furniture was valued at £125,000, and we offered a loan of £60,000, charging the client 1% per month and a 10% hammer fee.

The client was able to raise instant finance while waiting for the right moment to get the best price for the piece at auction.

Apply for an art loan

To apply for a secured loan against your art, please complete the online form on our website, or email [email protected]  with details and images of your assets. We’ll aim to respond within 2 hours.

 

 

 

My Highlights from the Sotheby’s Old Master Sale in April 2021

 

 

Download the article here

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