An Emeritus Professor of Nutrition and Physiology at Madgalen College, Brian Beynon Lloyd has spent the last 50 years amassing a collection of Old Master and later pictures which Phillips sold for £145,000 with just 8 per cent of the 264 lots left unsold.
There were no snoozing Poussin masterpieces on offer here, it seemed, with a relatively modest top price of £8700 being paid by a Paris dealer for a pair of classical landscapes from the Circle of Jan Frans Van Bloemen, called Orizonte (1662-1749). Unsigned and unlined, the pictures, one of which is shown right, measured 2ft 5in by 3ft 23/4in (73 x 98cm) and had been estimated at £4000-6000.
This price may well be exceeded by a pair of 17th century Neapolitan canvases of fish attributed to Giuseppe Recco, which Phillips
took out of the Lloyd Collection to include in their July 6 Old Master Paintings sale in London, estimated
at £10,000-15,000.
Academic alpha minus
UK: THE art trade generally classifies pictures as being either “commercial” or “academic” and it was generally the later term which best described the quality on offer at Phillips’ (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) March 19 sale of The Lloyd Collection of pictures in Oxford.
