Modern British Art

Described by one of his biographers as ‘The Last of the Norwich School’, Leonard Squirrell (1893-1979) was an East Anglian man through and through.

A view of a Tyneside street by Spennymoor mining artist Norman Cornish (1919-2014) took £5500 at local auction house Anderson & Garland (20% buyer’s premium).

The British Art Fair is an annual feeding ground for collectors of modern and post-war British art. This year’s staging of the 30-year-old event, which runs from September 20-23, marks a new chapter for the fair as it moves to London’s Saatchi Gallery.

British modernist Kenneth Lauder (1916-2004) used to entreat his opticians to create spectacles that would allow him to see the world upside down. They refused, but he remained determined to view life in a different way.

August is the month when Scotland takes it up a notch while the rest of the art world has a breather.

Henry Moore has been in the UK headlines recently thanks to the BBC Fake or Fortune? programme which revealed a watercolour sketch to be an authentic early lost work by the British sculptor and artist.

'Elements of Foliate Heads' will be instantly familiar to fans of John Piper (1903-92), despite the fact that the picture has not been on the market for more than half a century.

Unseen on the market since 1946, a view of Sloane Square (below) by Robert Buhler (1916-89) raced to £5000 at Ewbank’s (22.5% buyer’s premium).

In his later years, Welsh painter Wilf Roberts spent time going on drives, his wife Sue at the wheel, out to the Anglesey countryside. He would set off with pencils or watercolours to sketch landscapes while she waited for him in the car, reading.

A cartoon by Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) offers a rare and light-hearted look at her married life.

From 1936-45, St Ives artist John Wells (1907-2000) embarked on a series of labour-intensive creations while working as a GP on the Isles of Scilly.

Bill Clark runs Clark Art, which specialises in LS Lowry and modern British art, in Cheshire.

James and Jessica Rawlin of J&J Rawlin specialise in Modern British art and contemporary British ceramics. They are based in rural Suffolk. Here, James talks about their business and how they started it.

More than £35,000 worth of Modern British art from a single-owner collection sold at Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) in Winchester on June 27-28.

A still-life by Scottish Colourist George Leslie Hunter (1877-1931) not seen on the market for nearly half a century took £72,000 at Hansons (20% buyer’s premium).