Conservative realism, high glamour and war-time brutality vied for attention at Gleneagles in September, while Aboriginal art sold for record prices in Australia

Apollo, Oct, 2004 by Susan Moore

September saw a record sale for Sotheby's in Scotland, with the auction-house's annual Scottish and sporting pictures sale at Gleneagles, Auchterarder, achieving a record 5.4m [pounds sterling]. Individual records were set for works by Joseph Farquharson, F.C.B. Cadell and Peter Howson, while competition for the top lot of the sale, Jack Vettriano's Mad dogs, pushed it up to 330,400 [pounds sterling], the second highest price ever paid for a painting by the artist at auction. Despite the so-called 'Vettriano factor'--the phenomenal popularity of the Fife born painter Jack Vettriano that has not only seen huge prices for the artist's work but has also drawn a whole new crowd into the saleroom--the auction was not without its casualties, even among the Vettrianos, twelve out of the forty of which failed to find a buyer Oust fifty eight per cent of the sale was sold by lot, seventy-five per cent by value). Even so, the Gleneagles sale succeeds in being all things to all men--finding big prices for both the traditional and the challenging.

Farquharson, for instance, who is to sheep and snow what Atkinson Grimshaw is to autumn leaves and evening skies, found a substantial 285,600 [pounds sterling] for his On a clear eve, when the November sky grew red, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1899, in mint condition and in its original frame. In some sense, his success was not unlike Vettriano's, whose film noir-ish images grace anything from greetings cards to umbrellas. For Farquharson's wintry Scottish woods and snowdrifts drew crowds at the Royal Academy, and dealers such as Frost & Reid, who published over thirty different engravings of his work, sold thousands of his prints.

More interesting, perhaps, was the reception of the group of Peter Howsons--net the usual fare of Gleneagles, which is best known for its vintage guns and Wemyss ware pigs (a pair of the latter, incidentally, fetched a record 34,800 [pounds sterling] apiece). Sotheby's had never offered major Howsons hero, and the group of six by this particular New Glasgow Boy might have been seen as a bit a gamble--as, indeed, was offering forty Vettrianos. Dominating the group was his monumental The age of apathy, measuring almost two and a half metres wide, and showing Howson at his most aggressively brutal and harrowing. Painted before his trip to Bosnia as the Imperial War Museum's war artist, it is not a real but an imagined, nightmarish end rather Goya-esque response to the degradations and horror of war. In the middle distance are three figures staked out on crosses, on the roof sits a girl whose fleshy thighs are flung open and below is a seething, struggling morass of muscular humanity at is most bestial--all the more terrifying because they are just ordinary Joes in their vests and baseball caps compelled to commit acts of brute violence and torture. Expected to fetch 30,000 [pounds sterling]-40,000 [pounds sterling], it went to the trade for 64,800 [pounds sterling].

How different the glamour of F.C.B. Cadell. Both Sotheby's and Bonhams, in its 20 August sale in Edinburgh, had substantial groups by this particular Scottish Colourist. Sotheby's offered paintings together with a group of pen and ink and watercolour sketches from the Jack and Tommy series, formerly in the collection of one of Cadell's major patrons, Ion Harrison (seven out of the sixteen found new homes); Bonhams, a group of twelve works, ten from the bequest to Fettes College, Edinburgh, from a former school doctor, Dr A.B. Flett--the latest in a rather depressing line of art sales from schools and colleges. The highest price, 285,600 [pounds sterling], was achieved at Sotheby's for a pretty, Impressionistic view or the Jesuati in Venice. Interestingly, Bonhams' most valuable lot, a delectable interior of the artist's studio in George Street, failed to find a buyer, although fresh to the market (estimate 150,000 [pounds sterling]-200,000 [pounds sterling]), while the two studio interiors at Sotheby's sold well. Some suggested the stove and the linen made Studio interior, 130 George Street seem too domestic and utilitarian, for glamour seems to be what buyers like in Cadell.

Bonhams did, however, achieve the best price for Anne Bedpath. The Irish jug of 1957 is characteristic of her admired work of the 1940s in its palette of pale, chalky colours, but the brushwork, particularly of the white Belleek jug and tablecloth, is freer and more energetic. Selling for three times its low estimate, the painting changed hands at 61,650 [pounds sterling]. And, incidentally, five out of its six Vettrianos sold. Despite the predictions of the Jeremiahs, the Vettriano market is still holding up.

Aboriginal art in Australia

Sotheby's notched up another success over the summer with its eighth sale of Aboriginal art, in Melbourne, 26-27 July. This was the largest and most valuable sale put together for auction and, for the first time, was previewed in both Paris and London (some fifty to seventy per cent of previous sales had been acquired by European or American collectors). Since the formation of the department in 1996, each sale had eclipsed the previous result. That particular roll was not to continue, however, given the failure of the top lot--Rover Thomas's masterpiece Uluru or Ayers rock, estimated at AU$700,000-$1m and expected to become the most expensive Aboriginal painting ever sold at auction.