L.S. Lowry’s The Auction, the artist’s only known painting of an auction room, will make its auction debut in Sotheby’s Modern British Art auction in London on 23 November. Executed on a large scale in 1958, the work carries an estimate of £1,200,000 to 1,800,000 and will be exhibited to the public from 18 to 22 November.
The work has never before been offered at auction and was acquired by the present owners over two decades ago. It was shown at Lowry’s landmark retrospective at the Royal Academy in 1976 and was last exhibited at AMNUA in Nanjing, China, in 2014.
One of Britain’s most beloved artists, Lowry has been a mainstay at auction for decades, yet it is lesser known that he once turned his hand to painting an auction in progress. Populated by familiar characters, and even a dog on a lead, The Auction places the viewer at the centre of the action, with paintings stacked high, cabinets being viewed, and the auctioneer elevated on the rostrum and poised to bring the gavel down.
Lowry only ever painted a small handful of interior scenes, among them intimate family groups, a doctor’s surgery, an election rally and an outpatients’ hall. He had touched on the subject of auctions as early as the 1920s with a drawing titled Selling Up the Old Antiques Shop, and again in 1952 with Jackson’s Auction and Saleroom, which depicts the exterior of the Manchester auction house with furniture amassed outside.
The painting’s date falls in the same year as Sotheby’s auction of the Goldschmidt collection, which drew crowds down New Bond Street. Presented as a black-tie gala and heralding the ‘ Evening Sale’ format, the Goldschmidt sale was the first auction of its kind and attracted extensive public interest and newspaper headlines the following day.
The subject also reflects Lowry’s own relationship with the art market. He was frank about the financial side of his work, likening his art to a day job on a par with his tax collecting. Though he did not sell a single work at his first exhibition in Manchester in 1921, prices for his works reached £7,000 at auction during his lifetime. That success funded one indulgence, acquiring art by young artists including Sheila Fell and Lucian Freud as well as the Pre-Raphaelites, among them a version of Rossetti’s Proserpine, which he bought at auction in 1964 for 5,000 guineas.
(Press Release)
