BLAST #35 | British Art Fair Review

September 2026

Surprisingly Upbeat

British Art Fair got off to a sunny start, except for those crossing the river from Battersea, like me, who got snarled up in the interminable early morning traffic jam that greets anyone heading for the bridges, one of which is closed for the duration. Arriving late for the vetting, I came across a few early sales as I tried to catch up.

John Swarbrooke Fine Art sold Maeve Gilmore’s Woman with Flowers priced at £35,000. Gilmore had been married to the Gormenghast novelist Mervyn Peake and died in 1983. Her home in South Kensington was a work of art, crammed full of her murals and painted furniture which I was fortunate enough to have seen before it was dismantled. She never achieved any notoriety as an artist until the enterprising Studio Voltaire in Clapham mounted a show through her estate in 2022. Gilmore’s art has never sold for much at auction either, but a recent exhibition from her estate at the Alison Jacques gallery on Cork Street got the ball rolling. Swarbrooke was handling the painting on behalf of the art dealer (and former exhibitor at the British Art Fair) Pierre Spake who died this month. Also from Spake came a portrait of Francis Bacon by Mervyn Peake (£35,000) and works by Robin Ironside (a gouache and graphite drawing of a Hellenistic Shepherd c. 1940 sold for £17,500 TBC) and John Minton.

Nearby, I was delighted to see Richard Saltoun not only returning after a long absence to the fair, where he has always pushed the boundaries for collectors, but doing so again with an exhibition that focused on British-resident artists from the Middle East, such as Dia al Azzawi (up to £120,000) and Basil Alkazzi, a British artist of Saudi Arabian-Kuwaiti heritage who died last year (£4,000–£40,000). This picks up on the initiative I set with the dealer-led Crossing Borders exhibition at the fair two years ago. An early sale at Saltoun was a wax-on-mirror work, Sponge Head, c. 2009, by British artist Felicity Powell, for £8,000.

In the same area was art book dealer Marcus Campbell who has shifted his fair activity from books, which always attracted reams of browsers, to pictures which seems to be paying off. Among his better early sales was a unique 1960s work by the constructivist, Gillian Wise at £3,500. I would say that was a bargain. Her work rarely surfaces at auction but has made up to £15,000 for similar examples from the sixties and is often tipped to rise in value alongside the European constructivists.

Joan Warburton (1920-1996), Stil Life with Cedrics Vase, 1936, oil on canvas, 61 x 70 cm

As the more ambitious dealers move on to Frieze Masters where prices are higher for the international clientele, British Art Fair has become identifiable as a place for interesting, forgotten British artists of the 20th century. It’s good to know bargains can be found, and the fair was full of them. One was Still Life with Cedric’s Vase, 1936 by Joan Warburton which was an early sale on Sally Hunter’s stand at £3,500. I had included it in my Highlights preview in BLAST #34.

Another bargain was a pencil, pen and ink drawing by Paul Nash for his surrealist masterpiece Nocturnal Landscape, 1938, in the Manchester City Art Gallery, which was on offer for £7,500 with Harry Moore-Gwyn.

In the under £20,000 category there was enough to fill dozens of houses. Putting up red dots faster than most was Abbott and Holder for works by Ben Nicholson, Hans Tisdall, Cecil Collins, Graham Sutherland, Glynn Philpott and John Banting (soon to be granted a solo exhibition at John Swarbrooke Fine Art).

Who hears anything these days of Justin Knowles, a promising artist admired by Patrick Heron until 1973 when a fire in his studio burned all his work. A group of geometrically cut slabs of glass made by Knowles on his return to art-making 24 years later were on Austin/Desmond’s stand priced at £2 to 3,000 each on a shelf placed below a horizontal 1950s still life by John Copnall, the first living artist to consign a work to a Modern British art sale at Christie’s in 1986 attracting the attention of several dealers, including the co-founder of Austin Desmond (and of British Art Fair), Willie Desmond, to whom this once belonged, and which has now been sold on.

Who also, was Rosina Rogers? She’s not in the standard reference Dictionary of 20th Century British Painters and Sculptors by Francis Spalding and Judith Collins, or David Buckman’s encyclopaedic Artists in Britain since 1945. But at Quad Fine Art, which has two 1960s abstracts by her, we learn she lived from 1918 – 2011. was an art student at Bournemouth and was influenced by Patrick Heron in St Ives in the sixties. Her work was priced at £3,000 + ARR.

Again, emerging from obscurity, was Muriel Jackson, whom I previewed in my BLAST#34 edition whose work was on both Florence Evans’ stand and Ottocento, with prices mostly in the lower thousands of pounds and rising to £45,000. Jackson would certainly have qualified for my Unsung exhibition for overlooked 20th century artists at last year’s fair, where women provided most exhibits. Graduating from Unsung last year Gwynneth Johnstone was on the stands of both Jenna Burlingham and Middlemarch, while Robert Sandelson’s Aurulum is tipping Therese Oulton, a forgotten star of the eighties and nineties, for a major comeback.

Walter Richard Sickert, RA (1860-1942), *The Visitor, 1905-6,* canvas, 20 x 50.8 x 40.6 cm

Amongst the blue chips, Christopher Kingzett’s focus on the Camden Town Group paid off with an early sale of a 1905-06 (prime period) painting of a seated woman, The Visitor, in characteristically sombre yet sparkling tones (akin to Degas) by Walter Richard Sickert for around the asking price of £95,000, and a glowing little Harold Gilman of Snargate Rectory, 1910 -11, from the Joanna Pitman collection, priced at £38,000 which I also highlighted in BLAST#34. Additional early sales for Kingzett were the watercolours and drawings of boxers by John Minton and Keith Vaughan after which he described the mood at the fair as ‘surprisingly upbeat,’

Sickert’s position at the top of the sales table could be challenged by a large Patrick Heron abstract at Jenna Burlingham last seen at Hazlitt Holland Hibbert’s 2025 show commemorating Heron’s contribution to the 1965 São Paolo Biennale and here being admired by an advisor to the David Thomson collection (Canadian publishing billionaire) as well as Andrew Wilson on our vetting committee who is publishing his PhD thesis on Heron later this year and described it as “a complete knockout”. Four in Deep Cadmium, 1964, is all of five-foot square and was last at auction in 2018 when it made a double estimate £274,000, still one of the highest prices at auction for a post 1950s work by Heron. Selling at a much lower price range on the stand were works by Keith Vaughan, John Piper, John MacLauchlan Milne and John Piper amongst the Mod Brits, and Peter Joyce and Richard Ballinger amongst the contemporaries.

Pangolin London also had some five and six figure prices on sculptures by Lynn Chadwick, though here at the opening Chadwick’s prints in the lower thousands were the big sellers.

Spotted at the fair was Robert Scott, (son of artist William Scott) and his wife Lisa, who admired, amongst other things, The Birdcage, 1947, a coloured lithographic print by his father of a woman and young son (Robert as a child and his mother) in 1947 on Gwen Hughes’s stand. The original painting is in the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. This print, priced at £2,800 with the colours immaculately preserved, sold, I am told, back to the artist’s family.

Anne Rothenstein, Three Figures II. Oil on wood panel | 24.5” x 30” | 2015. Provenance: The Artist, Beaux Arts

Since buying and then selling British Art Fair to Will Ramsay, Robert Sandelson has moved from his base in Norfolk and set up Aurulum at his new home in West London. This year he used the fair to remind us of artists his family gallery, Montpelier, dealt with in the past, notably Anne Rothenstein, who was doing well with Stephen Friedman until he closed down. After a tussle to represent her amongst several top-level contemporary galleries Rothenstein is now with White Cube. It’s nice to see how her slightly old-world charm has caught the eye of new wave collectors. Sandelson had an earlier example of her work, Three Figures 2, 2015, which didn’t take long to sell priced at £30,000.

Sadly, missed this year was Angus Broadbent who died in August after a valiant battle with cancer aged only 62. I first met Angus about 40 years ago at a dinner to which he brought nothing so mundane as a bottle of wine, but several bottles of Guinness – the bottled variety is hard to find in the UK, and more commonly found in Africa. It has a distinct flavour and with it he won me over. At the time he was working for investment bankers Salomon Brothers or Bankers Trust, but having done the works of art course at Christie’s was looking at a change in direction. We discussed the virtues of Graham Paton, from whom he was thinking of buying some contemporary art. We then lost contact until he re-emerged as an art dealer hosting shows for our mutual friend Luke Elwes (now with Frestonian Gallery). Always cheerful, and married with two daughters, he popped up in various locations, representing somewhat neglected artists such as Anthony Benjamin and Jules de Goede. In 2010 he worked with Donald Fothergill on the refurbishment of Kinross House, a neo-classical mansion in Scotland adding some contemporary pizazz to its stately elegance. He and Fothergill were filmed on location by the BBC in the 2011 documentary, The Country House Revealed, and their work was awarded the Historic Houses Association Prize sponsored by Sotheby’s in 2013. He staged an exhibition of drawings and maquettes by Nigel Hall at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art in 2015 and embarked on another major refurbishment in Notting Hill acquiring work by Breon O’Casey from Pangolin London. But last year he could not man his stand at BAF where he was showing the work of the Pretenders singer Chrissie Hinde. Instead, his friend and neighbour, Mark Poltimore, formerly deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, stepped in to man the stand. Poltimore is now advising on the distribution of Broadbent’s stock as an independent art advisor. There will be a memorial service in November.

BLAST #35 | British Art Fair Review

BLAST #34 Part Two | British Art Fair Highlights