Samuel John Lamorna Birch RA RWS RWA (1869-1955), Family at Lamorna (cropped), circa 1915, Oil on canvas, 52 x 92 cm    

Post Impressionists

Walter Richard Sickert. This View of the Rue Mortier d’Or, Dieppe with the Church of St Jacques in the background (Browse & Darby) (POA), was painted in 1903 during an extended stay in the town where the artist made numerous topographically inspired works. It was a time, as the painting attests, in which he grew close to Degas and his painting to Impressionism. 

 Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), Rue de Mortier d’Or, Dieppe, 1903, Oil on canvas, 33 .5 x 41 cm

War Art

C.R.W. Nevinson. In the Air, lithograph, 1917 (Abbot and Holder)(£9,750). This rare print dates from the time when Nevinson, having flirted with Cubism, Vorticism and abstraction, had become disillusioned with the avant garde in the light of the horrors of war, and had returned to England where, as an official war artist, his first commission was to make six morale boosting lithographs entitled The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals of which In the Air was one. Twenty years later the artist said: ”I still think my aeroplane pictures are the finest work I have done”. Although two hundred were printed, they rarely surface on the market but selling for up to £15,000 each when they do.

C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946), In the Air, 1917, Lithograph, 40.5 x 30 cm

Surrealism

The fair would not be complete without at least two examples of British surrealism in the movement’s centenary year. 

Paul Nash. Studio, 1929, watercolour (Patrick Bourne & Co) (POA). Last exhibited in 1948 at The Tate Gallery’s memorial exhibition and then at the Leicester Galleries from whence it was last sold, this painting depicts the interior of the artist’s studio attached to Oxenbridge Cottage, Iden, near Rye, with its joining glass doors.  A rare example by the artist to bear no reference to landscape, it appears on the surface to be quite realistic, but on further consideration reveals a touch of mystery prefiguring Nash’s involvement in surrealism. 1929 was the year he travelled to France and met Max Ernst and Picasso, who had entered a surrealist phase. He was also mulling over the impact of a de Chirico exhibition he had seen in London in 1928. The painting then appears to be a metaphor for his own mind with empty canvases stacked up in a balanced geometry, like unrealised ideas in his imagination.

Eileen Agar. The Meeting, 1976 (Redfern) (£50,000). This has also been a year for female surrealists who were in a minority, and British ones  in an even smaller one. So, it’s appropriate for The Redfern Gallery to promote the most prominent British female surrealist, Eileen Agar, at the fair. Not only has Andrew Lambirth’s book on her colourful life, A Look at My Life, been reprinted (with some additions) by popular demand, but Redfern which represents her estate, has found itself joined in that role in America by the surrealist dealer, Wendi Norris, and leading contemporary gallery, Andrew Kreps.

Paul Nash (1889-1946) Studio, 1929, Watercolour, gouache, chalk and pencil, 57.3 x 41.3 cm

Eileen Agar RA (1899-1991), The Meeting, Acrylic on canvas, 38.1 x 55.9 cm

St Ives

Alfred Wallis. A Sailing Ship, 1936, (Alan Wheatley Art) (£65,000). Part of the early magic of St Ives was the discovery in 1928 by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood of the retired fisherman Alfred Wallis, in his cottage painting boats on whatever material he could find ‘for company’. Through Nicholson, Wallis’s simple, self-taught style, was to exert an influence on modern art and, when the works have a reliable provenance, on the market. At last year’s fair they were much in demand, and this year, Alan Wheatley has some particularly fine examples including this two masted brigantine going full pelt in blustery conditions from about 1936.

Alfred Wallis (1855-1942), A Sailing Ship, circa 1936, Oil and pencil on paper on board, 23 x 35 cm

Postwar abstraction

Bryan Wynter. Lightfall, 1960 (Cornish Masters) (£90,000). Having been a conscientious objector during the war, Wynter settled into a tumbledown cottage near St.Ives in 1945, gradually becoming a member of the thriving artist’s colony there.  Shifting from a neo-romantic style to abstraction, and, following his reading of Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, he started experimenting with mescalin, which resulted in his ‘new consciousness ‘ series of which Lightfall is an example combining his developed scientific interests in light and water. Heralded at the time by Alan Bowness as ‘among the few English painters of unquestionable international status,’ Wynter has only recently received the market recognition he deserved, his auction record $533,400 being reached in March this year in America.

Bryan Wynter (1915-1975), Lightfall, 1960, Oil on canvas, 152.5 x 76 cm

 Scottish art

Scottish art has always been a strong suit at the fair in which two of the longest running specialist dealers - Duncan Miller and The Fine Art Society – are taking part.

William Crosbie. Munnie and Janette, 1937 (The Fine Art Society) (£8,950). One of the joys of this fair are the number of overlooked and unsung artists of the past it unearths, such as William Crosbie. Crosbie once explained how he often got things the wrong way round – because he was born and brought up in China but from age of eleven he was educated in Scotland. Trained as an accountant, he decided instead to pursue Fine Art. In 1935, dissatisfied with art school because he  was saturated with the early 20th century romantic style that was fashionable in British colleges, he made for Paris where he studied under the inspirational modernist, Fernand Léger. The interlocking planes and thick graphic outlines in this composition bear some resemblance to the master’s work of this period, a device Léger was to employ in his stained-glass work. Such work, sometimes with a hint of the surreal, was probably the most modern Crosbie ever got. Returning to Scotland when war broke out in Europe, he settled for a broader spectrum of creativity, known for his work as a portraitist and muralist.

William Crosbie RSA (1915-1999), Munnie and Janette, 1937, Oil on paper, 58.5 x 66 cm

John Bellany. The Players, 1967, (Castlegate House Gallery) (£65,000). Painted in his postgraduate student days, The Players, says the gallery, ranks alongside much of Bellany’s work from 1965 to 1968 as “not just his finest painting, but as some of the most engaging and powerful work of any British artist of that era, or since”. 

At the time, Bellany was looking closely at German Expressionism – Otto Dix and Max Beckmann – and later that year visited Buchenwald. In The Players there is already an intense blend of figurative expressionism, and an almost spiritual paeon to Scottish nationalism, traditional music and the fishing industry to which he was umbilically linked. 

Bellany’s interest in music was deep set. In his youth he had a band called ‘The Blue Bonnets’ (a political symbol associated with poor farmers and the Jacobite army) in which he played a whistle or pipe. He had a lifelong interest in traditional Scottish folk music and after he died, the famous pipe player, Hamish Moore, who had revived the use of the handheld small pipe,  gave a recital in his honour.

The strong autobiographical element in which the stage left figure is a self-portrait is reinforced in the background with men gutting fish (a metaphor for human suffering) just as the artist did on a Saturday whilst a student.

Prior to its appearance at British Art Fair,  the painting has been in the same private collection for over 50 years.

John Bellany (1942-2013), The Players, 1967, Oil on board, 161 x 183 cm

Ceramics

It is with great pleasure that the fair welcomes a specialised ceramics dealer to its ranks in the shape of Oxford Ceramics Gallery, formed in 2006 by collector James Fordham and partner Rachel Ackland. A recent acquisition which they will be exhibiting is a 16.5cm diameter porcelain Conical Bowl, c. 1952 (POA), with sgrafitto markings made in 1952  by one of the most revered ceramic artists of all time, the late Dame Lucie Rie.

Lucie Rie (1902-1995), Conical Bowl, c. 1952, Porcelain with sgraffito, 7 x 16.5 cm

Contemporary

Bill Jacklin. Whirling and Swirling 1, 2013, (Portland Gallery) (£24,000). When British artist, Bill Jacklin, met with critical and commercial success in the 1980s through his new gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, he moved to New York where one of the subjects that preoccupied him was light and constant movement in the city – especially people, and in particular the skaters he observed on the Wollman Rink in Central Park. The subject continued to engage him deep into the present century as in this typically choreographed painting of 2013. His gallery, Marlborough, though, has closed, so into the breach, as a temporary measure, has stepped Portland Gallery which gives all a chance to see a selection of recent work (prices £20/30,000 tbc) following Jacklin’s sell out contribution to this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. 

Bill Jacklin (b. 1943), Whirling and Swirling I, 2013, Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 61 cm