The Welsh Sale

The July Welsh Sale is now online. Click View Lots below.

Special mention to the excellent entry of pictures by Sir Kyffin, including from the collection of the Late Roberta Condon who died in 2016. Roberta was the owner of The Kyffin Gallery in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, so named in honour of the great man. The pictures have been entered by Roberta’s family on the back of the auction records we have been achieving in the last two years.

I must also mention two monumental art pieces that have come from private sources for this Welsh Sale. We regularly sell works by Peter Prendergast (1946-2007) in The Welsh Sale, but it is rare that his huge landscape paintings appear on the market. But ironically, it is these massive works tapestry form landscapes in oils that Peter Prendergast is best known for, with the most famous examples held at The National Museum of Wales (‘Blaenau Ffestiniog’, 1993) and at The Tate (‘Bethesda Quarry, 1980-81).

It is a similar story for another monumental lot in this Welsh Sale, in that we regularly sell smaller works from the versatile John Petts (1914-1991), but his most famous work is on a much larger scale. The The Wales Window for Alabama, 1964, stained-glass window installed at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama is an icon for the civil rights movement. To our knowledge another stained glass by John Petts has not been offered at auction before. We are very excited to have such significant artwork in the sale.

My first written musings on the Welsh art market were for my A-Level Art & Design course many years ago. I wrote a potted history of the Welsh art market and of locations in north Wales which were repeatedly used as a subject matter by artists over the years. There were two artists who bookended my dissertation – Richard Wilson RA (1714-1782) and Sir Kyffin Williams. I could never have predicted that over thirty years later I would be cataloguing and auctioning works by these two artists. Wilson is regarded as the founding father of Welsh landscape painting, and I am thrilled to be able to offer an example. Continuing with the serendipity, I now live in mid-Wales just five minutes from Wilson’s rectory home in Penegoes. It is odd how things work out over the course of thirty years!

Happy browsing!