Housekeeper sweeps up the top price in 270-lot auction...
17th April 2019
Lawrences Spring Fine Art sale on April 12th included 270 lots of pictures and there were strong prices for prints, watercolours and drawings spanning five centuries. £1250 was paid for a 1657 Rembrandt etching of `The Agony in the Garden`and a surprising £7500 was paid for a gruesome Thomas Rowlandson watercolour of four men hanging from a gibbet. A fine Old Master painting of flower in an urn by Mario Nuzzi (c.1660) made £9375 and a fine portrait of King Louis XVI, believed to have once hung in the British Embassy in Paris, was bought for £6250. A magnificently lucid view of the Bay of Palermo, Sicily, by the celebrated Italian artist Francesco Lojacono made £25,000 but two Cornish subjects concluded the sale on a high note. A small sketch of a fishing boat off a pier by the untrained St Ives mariner Alfred Wallis just exceeded its upper estimate to make £16,250 and a fine picture by Henry Scott Tuke of his long-serving housekeeper Elizabeth Fouracre sold within expectations at £25000.
