BLAST #33

July 2026

Good timing

This summer, the first London exhibition for fifty years for ‘the two Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde, was staged by up-and-coming art dealer, Oliver Brooke-Walder, in which their work was placed alongside that of their friends and associates, John Minton, Keith Vaughan, Jankel Adler and Ceri Richards. Half the show, subtitled The Celtic Soul, in which prices ranged from £1,500 for prints to £70,000 for paintings, was sold, no doubt encouraged by the impact of the museum-style show…Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: Artists, Lovers, Outsiders…held at Charleston in Lewes from October 2025 to April 2026. Brooke-Walder’s perfectly timed follow-up exhibition in his Duke Street St James’s gallery ran from June to 3 July. Whilst loved and admired during their short lifespans, pursuing an idiosyncratic mix of expressionism and neo-romanticism, neither met with enduring success, dying young in relative poverty – Colquhoun, nicknamed ‘McPicasso’ in 1962, aged 46, and MacBryde, nicknamed ‘MacBraque’, in 1966, aged 53. The market for their work has picked up lately reaching a record £102,000 for Colquhoun at Christie’s in November 2015, and a record £47,900 for MacBryde at Christie’s in October 2024. At Brooke-Walder’s show, a previously unseen portfolio of prints (see illustration below) made by the Millers Press in Lewes in the 1940s was sold to the Fry Art Gallery in Essex. Originally priced at ten guineas, it now sold in the lower thousands of pounds.

Robert Colquhoun (1914-1962) & Robert MacBryde (1913-1966), Millers lithographs no. 4: six lithographs, 1948. Lithographs printed in colours, signed, 51 x 33.5 cm

Evergreen

Mary Fedden, Still Life. One of the 25 works by the artist sold by Portland Gallery

A large exhibition of fifty-five works by Mary Fedden at Portland Gallery (24 June–10 July), many from the artist’s estate, met with a positive response when over twenty-five paintings sold for a total in excess of £350,000. There was a good mix of sales across mediums and date ranges. The earliest painting to sell was a stunning 1956 still life oil (pictured here), but the later works also did very well, such as Still Life with Lemons from 2000.

“We were delighted to welcome back many collectors who had supported previous exhibitions but also introduce more first-time buyers of Mary Fedden to her work,” said gallery director Jamie Anderson. “There was also a surprising international dimension to the sales. Unlike previous exhibitions where certain themes and periods have proved to be more popular, this time the sales were spread remarkably evenly across works of diverse subjects and dates. Despite the number of other competing events (from auctions to art fairs), wider political concerns and at times, searing heat, we found it heartening that so many people visited the gallery – proof if anything that the gallery exhibition model still has plenty of life left in it.” Remaining works for sale range from a 6-inch square watercolour, ‘Garden Flowers’, 1991 (£4,000 + ARR), to the 38 x 48-inch oil ‘Summer’, 1958 (£65,000 + ARR).

Modern British women moving up

Described variously as French or British/Mexican, the surrealist Bridget Tichenor (1917–1990) had a complex upbringing – born in France, educated at the Slade in London, she had links with British royalty and aristocracy and after a spell at Vogue as a model and fashion editor moved to Mexico in the 1950s where she befriended another British surrealist, Leonora Carrington, and pursued life as a magical realist artist. Along with other women surrealists, she was overlooked by the market until recently. Her name was noticed in 2007 when a painting at Christie’s New York, estimated at $2,000, sold for $20,000. Nineteen years later, in May, while everyone was focused on a $189 million Jackson Pollock and the SI Newhouse collection in New York, an Untitled painting by Tichenor, estimated at $60,000, sold at Christie’s for $838,200. At Sotheby’s, another Tichenor painting estimated at $40,000 sold for $194,000. The artist has yet to be reclaimed by the British art world.

Another previously neglected Modern British female artist who is breaking into the top ranks is Marlow Moss. At the Sotheby Modern Art sale in June, her Mondrian-esque White Yellow and Black, 1953, estimated at £450,000, sold for £1.18 million ($1.56 million)… not only a record but an impressive CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) gain of 18.1% per annum for the seller who bought it in Amsterdam in 2013 for $192,239.

Branson’s choice

Ken White; Portrait 1981-2. At Winsor Birch. Price £14,500

Winsor Birch is hosting an exhibition in its Marlborough Wiltshire gallery from 23 July to 14 August of over sixty works by the little-known artist Ken White (1943–2025), whom Richard Branson has described as “One of the most extraordinary creative artists of our time”. Few will be familiar with White’s work, though many will have seen it emblazoned on the side of a Virgin aeroplane. Born in Swindon in 1943, White left school at fifteen to work in the riveting section of the Great Western Railway workshop. After four years he graduated to the signwriting department where he learned illustration skills that he could use in the music press and then in large scale public murals – the 1976 Golden Lion Bridge mural, for instance, and the 1982 trompe l’oeil on the rear wall of the Royal Opera House. In 1984, White embarked on a two-decade-long relationship with Richard Branson and Virgin, producing work at his private residencies in Oxfordshire and Palm Beach and at Virgin offices, hotels and megastores worldwide. His instructions were simple: “If there’s a wall, paint it.” In between commissions, he continued to paint life as he saw it…sometimes grim but always heartfelt. When his wife died in 2017, he reverted to unpopulated landscapes that mirror his grief.

Prints are priced from £395, paintings at up to £14,500.

BLAST #32