8 June 2023
Nick Curnow
Unseen in public for 80 years, a beautiful Colourist still life by Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883-1937) soared to a sensational £400,200 in our summer auction of Scottish Paintings & Sculpture. With 100% of works by the Scottish Colourists finding new owners, the 08 June sale posted a market-leading total of over £1.73 million.
On a day not short of saleroom drama, Cadell’s Still Life with Tulips was the undoubted star selling well above its pre-sale guide of £100,000-150,000. The 51 x 61cm composition sets a blue-glazed jug of four tulips, a green tea bowl, a blue and white vase and four citrus fruits against a lilac wall.
Alice Strang, Lyon & Turnbull’s Senior Specialist, and an acknowledged expert on the Scottish Colourists, explained its appeal.
“Still Life with Tulips overflows with the confidence and sophistication that Cadell brought to his paintings after demobilisation and a move to 6 Ainslie Place in Edinburgh’s New Town in 1920. This marked change in technique - a flatter rendering of form and use of saturated colour - is thought to have been encouraged by Cadell’s new surroundings, by his close collaboration with fellow Colourist Samuel John Peploe (1871-1935) who lived nearby, by his interest in the Art Deco movement, and possibly in response to life in the squalor of the trenches.”
Peploe’s own Still Life with Roses sold at £125,200. Painted in the freer and more expressive style he adopted in the mid to late 1920s, it uses a familiar a cast of objects which recur in his paintings and the roses he would buy from the flower stalls of Princes Street, Edinburgh. In 1929, Peploe declared “there is so much in mere objects, flowers, leaves, jugs, what not – colours, forms, relation – I can never see mystery coming to an end.” The depiction of stems refracting in water in Still Life with Roses is a master class in the handling of oil paint.
Works by Peploe’s friend and near contemporary Robert Brough (1872-1905) appear on the market more infrequently than those of the Scottish Colourists. Young, ambitious and precociously talented, his career was cruelly cut short after he sustained fatal injuries in a train crash in 1905. His mother and his mentor John Singer Sargent were at his bedside when he died.
The 68 x 104cm oil on canvas Sweet Violets dates to 1897, shortly after Brough returned to his native Aberdeen from France (he shared lodgings with Peploe while training at the Académie Julian in Paris) and was establishing himself as an accomplished society portraitist. Using a landscape format and characteristically flamboyant brushwork, he depicts his model, Barbara Staples, wearing a spectacular hat and veil. She holds aloft a jar of violets, with their purple hues reflected at her throat and cuffs.
The painting was acquired by British surgeon Alexander Ogsten and hung in his home at Ardoe House, Aberdeen, for many years. Although he steadfastly refused to sell it in his lifetime, in 1960 it was bought by Staples’ family and, after inclusion in the 1995 Brough exhibition at Aberdeen Art Gallery, was purchased by the vendor. Offered at auction for the first time, it sold for £118,950 – more than double the previous record for the artist at auction.
Last December our Scottish Paintings team sold Joan Eardley’s 1963 oil and collage The Yellow Jumper for a record-breaking sum of £200,200. Interest in the artist continues to grow and grow, with the June sale featuring 13 works by Eardley which reached nearly £300,000 in total. They included compelling images created in the Townhead district of Glasgow and the Aberdeenshire fishing village of Catterline – the two contrasting locations and communities which inspired much of her oeuvre.
Eardley made frequent painting trips to Catterline, a working harbour rather than a picturesque Highland village, from 1951 before renting a small cottage, No. 1 South Row, from 1954. The 36 x 53cm oil on canvas Footsteps in the Snow, The Row, Catterline was painted there at daybreak after a fresh fall of snow. The footprints are those of the artist herself who braved the cold and found the place from which to paint the scene. Eardley gave the work to her mother’s housekeeper, Mrs McLusky in 1963. The latter pointed out that it was unsigned, whereupon Eardley wrote her name in pencil at the lower right. It was acquired by the vendor’s family in 1980: estimated at £15,000-20,000, it sold for £55,200.
In the book Joan Eardley: Land & Sea – A Life in Catterline, author Patrick Elliott wrote:
“The worse the weather, the more Eardley wanted to paint at Catterline. If she was in Glasgow and heard reports of north-easterly gales brewing off the east coast, she would happily pack her bags and head north.”
The Sea No. 5 is part of a series of oils Eardley painted after moving to No. 18 South Row. The property had a spectacular view down to the bay and the ever-changing state of the North Sea. Painted in 1963, not long before Eardley’s premature death, it was acquired by the owner’s great-aunt. Estimated at £20,000-30,000, it sold for £47,700.
Eardley maintained studios in Catterline a well as at 204 St James Road in Townhead, Glasgow, above a scrap-metal merchant’s premises. The area was rundown and overcrowded, yet she was drawn to its vibrancy. A classic Townhead image of Two Children worked in pastel on brown paper sold at £35,200. It had been acquired from the artist’s estate by the owner’s father.
The sale also included two works created at key career points by the Scottish Colourist John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961). Both shared the same provenance that combined four key figures in the cultural life of post-war Glasgow. They had been given in the 1960s by the artist’s widow Margaret ‘Meg’ Morris (of Margaret Morris Movement fame) to Martha Lawrence Grant (1916-96) and her husband, drama professor James Fullarton Arnott (1914-82). The quartet enjoyed a lifelong creative friendship.
Sold for £21,420 was Kelvin Valley, a 25 x 19cm oil on board signed, titled and dated 1942. In this jewel of a painting, Fergusson pays homage to the location that provided the final chapter of an international career. The lyrical landscape depicts a view near that artist’s Clouston Street flat close to Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens and Kelvingrove Park.
The watercolour Supper Dance was executed during the six years Fergusson immersed himself in the artistic, intellectual and social life of Paris before the onset of the First World War. His fluid draughtsmanship is clear in passages such as the female dancer’s gown, whilst a lively composition leads the eye from the champagne on ice in the foreground, to the dancing couple, to another observed in intimate conversation in the background. It sold at £12,600.
Nick Curnow, Head of Fine Art, was very pleased with the sale’s results,
“It was great to be on the rostrum and experience the demand for works by Scottish artists from collectors across the world – culminating in a result that positions us as the current market leaders in this burgeoning field.”
*All sold prices include buyer's premium.
Lyon & Turnbull’s Scottish Paintings & Sculpture specialists present two auctions per year from our historic headquarters in Edinburgh to an international audience live online. Successfully selling over 90% of Scottish Colourist works handled in the last nine years, a record unmatched by our competitors – selling Scottish art in Scotland has always been a Lyon & Turnbull lynchpin. Our specialists are experts not only on the works of Scottish artists, but also on the workings of the art market, and it is this combination that fuels our on-going success in the field.
