Maltese Masterpiece Sails to £21,000...
9th July 2019
With subject matter as varied as a floodlit New York boxing ring and a Cornish bay bathed in sunlight, Lawrences’s picture sale on July 5th offered something for every collector.
A fine watercolour of Venice by William Wyld, drawn in 1839, made £3000 but the beneficiaries will be St Margaret’s Hospice as the watercolour had been donated to them for sale. A pair of portraits of Paul I of Russia and his Empress, Marie Feodorovna, were period copies after originals by Alexander Roslin and made their top estimate of £12,500. A fine early 19th Century marine oil of Valletta harbour (Malta) in the style of Anton Schranz made three times its low estimate to take £21,250. A large, sweetly sentimental oil of a Collie dog maintaining his composure in the presence of playful kittens, painted by Wright Barker in 1901, was bought for just over £5000. A less playful lot was a lithograph by the celebrated American artist George Bellows. This 1916 print, by an artist whose work is rarely seen in Britain, was entitled `Between Rounds` and depicted a break in a boxing match at Madison Square Gardens, New York. It proved to be a big hitter as it made £4000.
A sensuous, demure oil of a coy female nude in a Cornish landscape by Harold Knight took £12,500 and a sparkling watercolour sketch of a boat in Lamorna Cove by his wife, Dame Laura, dated from 1919 and bobbed away at £11,250.
