Sotheby's to Auction Lord Attenborough's Superb Cross-Section of British Art

Written by Jessica Laurens Sunday, 08 November 2009 00:38

LONDON.- Following the announcement in August of the sale of a group of pictures from the collection of Lord and Lady Attenborough at Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday, November 11, 2009, Sotheby’s is now providing further details of this spectacular, one-off single-owner sale. "A Life In Pictures: The Collection of Lord and Lady Attenborough" will present a superb cross-section of British Art from the middle decades of the 20th-century that the Attenboroughs have assembled over the last 60 years with immense passion and a very distinctive eye. The leading names of LS Lowry, Edward Burra, Ivon Hitchens, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Christopher Wood – many of whom the Attenboroughs knew personally - are all represented in the collection and feature alongside one of the most remarkable group of prints by Christopher Nevinson to appear on the market in recent years. The 51 lots are expected to realize in excess of £2 million.

The Attenboroughs’ collecting:
Lord and Lady Attenborough first started collecting British art in the 1940s and it is a hobby and a passion that still remains a significant part of their lives today. Through their collecting they established relationships with many artists and galleries and among the artists they came to know well were Matthew Smith, Graham Sutherland, Edward Burra, Stanley Spencer, Bryan Kneale, Bryan Organ, Henry Moore and LS Lowry. Lord Attenborough’s love of art was inherited from his parents and in particular his father, who in his words “was a distinguished and progressive educationalist who passionately believed that the arts had a fundamental role at the center of a rounded and civilizing education.”

The Attenboroughs’ collecting taste mirrored that of many of their theatre-world contemporaries - such as John Mills, John Boulting, Larry Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson - and their collection traces the artistic trends in British Art in the mid-part of the 20th-century, while at the same time reflects the experiences and interests of Lord Attenborough’s own career. Key British artists represented in the collection each interpret the significant communal experiences of their day – whether the Second World War, the lives of the working classes or the struggles and achievements of iconic figures of the 20th-century – just as Lord Attenborough did through his work as a renowned actor, director and producer.

Talking about their early years of collecting, Lord Attenborough states: “Such was mine and Sheila’s passion that we had a few paintings on the walls of our Richmond home (in which we rattled around to this day 60 years later) acquired at a very young and impecunious time when we couldn’t even afford carpets and curtains… I still love all the paintings we bought when we were young.”

And discussing the decision to offer for sale this group of 20th-century British Paintings and Prints, Lord Attenborough, said: “60 years ago my wife Sheila and I bought the house we live in to this day. We could not afford carpets or curtains, but more importantly for us we had a few pictures for our walls. Today, this passion has led us to the position of possessing more paintings than those walls can contain. We have loved and cherished these wonderful pieces throughout the course of our lives, but in all truth, art belongs to no one, some of us are simply its temporary, fortunate and delighted custodians. Now is the moment for us to pass on these ravishing images for others to treasure and enjoy.”

The sale highlights:
"Old Houses" by L.S. Lowry is one of the sale’s undoubted highlights and this is a superb example of the artist’s imagery that manages to be simultaneously nostalgic, theatrical and questioning. In the late-1950s and early-1960s, the ‘new wave’ of British cinema brought the lives of the working classes to the fore and found an artistic parallel in the paintings of Lowry and during this period his works entered the collections of many in the dramatic worlds, such as Lord Attenborough, who remained a close friend of the artist for many years. The Attenboroughs were great admirers of the urban realism of Lowry’s work. Old and dilapidated buildings always held a fascination for Lowry and in Old Houses, estimated at £300,000-500,000, he represented the kind of life which was only too familiar in countless industrial districts of cities across the midlands and the north of England.

Christopher Wood is represented in the sale by two works: "Flowers on a Chair with Pipe and Paper", estimated at £100,000-150,000, and "Card Players", which is expected to fetch £30,000-50,000. The first of these works was painted in Paris in 1928 and, typical of many of the works in the Attenboroughs’ collection, the theme is perhaps not what it at first appears. The apparently casual arrangement of everyday objects and flowers on closer inspection tell the story of the frequent duality in Wood’s work, an artist with a somewhat changeable mental state, depending on the circumstances in which he found himself and his relationships at the time. While the pipe, packet, newspaper and jug are all painted with Wood’s usual broad and fluid handling, the flowers are rendered with a huge level of intensity and perhaps hint at narcotics in play.

Lord Attenborough first purchased "Card Players" in the 1940s but he was then forced to sell the picture in the late 1970s to help finance a film he was working on at the time. He describes: “I desperately needed to raise money – in fact for my long cherished film of ‘Gandhi.’ So I sold my beloved Card Players by Christopher Wood, inspired by Cézanne and one of the first paintings I ever bought from the Redfern in 1949. As soon as it became available again and I could afford it, I bought it back!” Lord Attenborough did indeed purchase the work again in 1985 and it has remained in his collection since. One of Wood’s earliest pictures, "The Card Players" was painted in Paris around the Christmas of 1922. Directly influenced by Cézanne, Wood mentions the painting in a letter to his mother and the subject was one to which the artist returned on a number of occasions over the years.

Two landscapes by Edward Burra are entitled "Harbour with Boats", "Plymouth and Wye Valley" I and these are estimated at £120,000-180,000 and £70,000-100,000 respectively. Landscape was an important part of Burra’s early work but it was only towards the end of his career that it became a subject to which he devoted considerable time and effort and the two landscapes on offer vary in date by a period of approximately 30 years.

The panoramic sweep of Plymouth Harbor dates from 1936 – some 32 years earlier than the view of Wye Valley – and while at first it seems to capture the everyday details of a very British harbor; a closer look shows the artist’s tendency for surrealist sensibilities. Shortly after he painted the Plymouth view he became completely occupied with images relating to the Spanish Civil War and did not return to the landscape genre until the late 1940s.

Christopher Nevinson is represented by a superb depiction of "The Battlefields of Britain" as well as an exemplary group of prints. Although Nevinson will always be linked to his images of the "Western Front" during the First World War, "The Battlefields of Britain" – which dates from 1941, the dark days of the Second World War – demonstrates that he had not lost his ability to capture the essential nature of each specific conflict.

As the first major invasion threat fought over, if not actually on, British soil for centuries, the Battle of Britain was of huge national significance and Nevinson created an image that even as time passes, remains an icon of a key moment in British history. It was one of three paintings that Nevinson produced under the group title "The Battlefields of Britain"; two were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1942. The artist presented one version to the nation in late 1942 and it hung in the Council Room of the Air Ministry during the war.

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