Collectors Face Up To Good Portraits in 320-Lot Sale
21st January 2020
There were strong prices from four centuries of art in our auction of pictures on January 17th.
A watercolour of a panorama of Jerusalem from the mid-1790s was identified as the work of Gavrila Sergeyevich Sergeyev (c.1765-1816) and was eagerly contested to £8750 whilst a very different sort of subject, an idyllic thatched cottage in Chideock (Dorset) by Helen Allingham, was bought for just over £9300.
Portraits and figure subjects performed well: a previously unknown portrait of Mary, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange (1631-1660), daughter of King Charles I, was ascribed to Adriaen Hanneman and made £6250. A portrait of a noblewoman, probably `Bess of Hardwick`, Countess of Shrewsbury (c.1527-1608), from the circle of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger took just over £13,000 and led a group of pictures from a deceased estate that totalled almost £57,000. A beautifully serene small oil on paper by Frederick Cayley Robinson entitled `A Summer Evening` dated from c.1910 and was bid to £10,000 whilst a late-period oil by Walter Sickert entitled `Second Course`, circa 1935 (copying a Victorian work by Adelaide Claxton), was bought for £10,600. An exquisitely detailed still life by Cecil Kennedy, showing roses in a glass vase with a ladybird, measured just 24 x 19cm and was bought for £7500.
