• Michael Ayrton (1921-1975) Girl Wringing out her Hair Patinated bronze, 1962 26cm in height Michael Ayrton was a British artist and writer, renowned as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and designer, and also as a critic, broadcaster and novelist. This sculpture, rendered in patinated bronze, is a portrayal of an unposed nude, one of Ayrton's favourite subjects. In his book "Drawings and Sculpture", Ayrton muses on his studies of bathers: 'I like to study the nude when he or she is untroubled by my observation, and bathers in general are the only nudes, or semi-nudes, who are not particularly interested in the onlooker.' Provenance: Acquired directly from the Artist by Nigel Balchin, a close friend of Ayrton's, thence by descent to the previous owner. Sotheby's, Lot 128, 11 July 2013. Literature: Michael Ayrton, Drawings and Sculpture, with a Forward by C. P. Snow, Cory, Adams & Mackay, London, 1962, illustrated pl.73 (another cast). If you'd ike to know more, please email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056.
  • Wilfred Gabriel de Glehn RA (1870-1951)

    Clare College from the Backs

    Watercolour Inscribed “To my friend H Thirkill Master of Clare” Signed “W de Glehn, 1940” 40x50cm De Glehn painted Henry Thirkill in a portrait that is in the collection of Clare College and may be viewed here. Thirkill was Master between 1939 and 1958 and the portrait was commissioned in 1947. A versatile painter, skilled at portraiture, landscapes and figures de Glehn is regarded as one of England’s premier Impressionist painters. His ability to portray lighting in a lively fashion and his vibrant use of colour combine to provide wonderfully rich paintings. If you are interested email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056.
  • John Piper (1903-1992)

    Newchurch, Romney Marsh (1947)

      Watercolour 40 x 57 cm Provenance: Marlborough Galleries. Signed lower right. A characterful Piper view of Newchurch Church, Kent, with its leaning tower. John Piper CH was an English painter, printmaker, and designer of stained-glass windows. His work often focused on the British landscape, especially churches and monuments, and included tapestry designs, book jackets, screen-prints, photography, fabrics and ceramics. Condition: very good. If you are interested, please email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056. Click here for other works by John Piper.
  • John Aldridge RA (1905 - 1983)

    Still Life Painted at El Porche, Deja, Majorca 1932

    Oil on Board 74 x 62 cm Signed ‘John Aldridge’ lower right and titled to reverse. Aldridge read Greats at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and then moved to London in 1928 and taught himself to paint. From 1931 to 1933 he exhibited with the Seven and Five Society at the Leicester Galleries and in 1934 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale. At this time he began his life-long association with the poet Robert Graves and the poets and artists who centred themselves on him in the village of Deia in Majorca. In 1933 he moved to Place House in Great Bardfield with his cats. He became a friend of his neighbour Edward Bawden, and the two collaborated during the 1930s on Bardfield wallpapers, distributed by Cole & Sons. During the War, Aldridge served in the Intelligence Corps, interpreting aerial photographs. Following the war he returned to Great Bardfield and painted scenes of the Essex countryside, and also of Majorca. By this period, his early association with the avant garde of British art had been lost; today, his rural scenes are very popular but arguably lack the complexity of his earlier works, such as this contemplative still life. His art is in major public collections such as the Tate, the British Council, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden, which specialises in East Anglian pictures, has a significant holding of his work. Condition: generally very good. Distressed frame with occasional loss, and hardboard substrate bowed.
  • Fredda Brilliant (1903-1999)

    The Young Atlas

    Patinated bronze 52.5 x 41.5 x 27.5 cm ; 16kg. On wooden base   Fredda Brilliant was a Polish sculptor and actress, born in Łódź, Poland. She worked in a variety of media and is recognized as an accomplished sculptor, writer, actor, singer and script writer. Throughout her career she traveled extensively working in England, USA, Australia, India, Poland and Russia. Brilliant sculpted some of the greatest figures of her time including Jawaharlal Nehru, V.K. Krishna Menon, Indira Gandhi, U.S. President John F Kennedy, and Buckminster Fuller. She also sculpted her husband, the writer Herbert Marshall. Brilliant's most famous work is a bronze statue of Mahatma Gandhi which is the centerpiece of the park in Tavistock Square, London, UK. Condition: excellent.
  • Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004)

    Monreale, Sicily (1955)

      Pencil and wash on paper 48 x 58 cm Signed and dated lower left. A heady evocation of summer in Sicily, characterised by burnt oranges and yellows. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was born in St Andrews, Fife, on 8 June 1912. Her parents were second cousins, and their respective families were well established representatives of minor Scottish gentry from both the east and west of the country. As a child, Barns-Graham showed very early signs of creative ability. It was at school that Wilhelmina decided that she wanted to be an artist, stating later in life that "painting chose me, not I it". After school she set her sights on Edinburgh College of Art where, after some dispute with her father (who was an emotional man prone to uncontrolled anger), she enrolled in 1931. During her time at Edinburgh College, Barns-Graham was taught by tutors including portrait painter David Alison and painter William MacTaggart. Her friends there included the influential Scottish painters Robert MacBryde, Robert Colquhoun, and William Gear. After her education, Barns-Graham made study trips to Paris, London, and St Tropez before moving to St Ives, Cornwall, in 1940 (at the suggestion of the Edinburgh College of Art's Principal Hubert Wellington). Barns-Graham moved near to where a group of modernist artists had settled, at Carbis Bay - this was a pivotal moment in her life. On one of her first evenings there she met the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who made an immediate and lasting impression on her. She then went on to meet Borlase Smart, Alfred Wallis, and Bernard Leach, as well as the painter Ben Nicholson and the sculptors Naum Gabo and Margaret Mellis. After two weeks in St Ives, Barns-Graham acquired her first studio, directly below the Porthmeor Gallery which was the administrative headquarters of the St Ives Society of Artists. Her paintings at the time were heavily influenced by the Cornish landscapes and the St Ives harbour. During 1940 and 1941, Barns-Graham contributed to the war effort by volunteering in a factory making camouflage nets. In 1942 Barns-Graham became a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists, in which she exhibited with every year, and the St Ives Society of Artists. Whilst establishing herself in St Ives, Barns-Graham also continued to send work back to Scotland for major exhibitions held there such as the Royal Scottish Academy's 117th Exhibition in 1943. The 1940s were an active time for the St Ives Society of Artists who received a number of invitations to send exhibitions and groups of works to galleries in the UK and abroad, Barns-Graham's work was always included in these as the Society's secretary, Borlase Smart, thought highly of her work. Barns-Graham's first opportunity to exhibit in London came when her work was included in a group exhibition of six at the Redfern Gallery. This was due to the introduction and support of Patrick Heron, who had visited Barns-Graham's studio in St Ives and was excited by her work. Barns-Graham would later have her first one-person exhibition in London at Redfern in 1952. After a few years of tension, Barns-Graham eventually left the St Ives Society of Artists in 1949, becoming one of the founding members of a new breakaway group named Penwith Society of Arts. The first Penwith Society exhibition opened in June 1949 to huge success - 2755 paying visitors came to see it. Provenance: Barns-Graham Charitable Trust, authentication no 1665. If you are interested, please email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056.
  • Bryan Ingham (1936-1997)

    Erotische Bild (1988)

      Oil on board 62 x 11 cm Provenance: Fracis Graham-Dixon gallery. Titled to backboard and dated 1988. Bryan Ingham was born in Yorkshire. For his National Service he joined the RAF, and spent his time in Germany as an airman. After demobilisation, his final report included the statement that "Ingham is an artistic sort of airman." In his spare time he had started painting in oils, and by the time he left the RAF he had completed a large number of paintings. He studied at St Martin's School of Art in London, where he had the tuition of a fine post-war generation of teachers who helped him to hone his draughtsmanship and other skills, and he swiftly showed a capacity for painting that drew the attention of his tutors and peers. On graduating he was offered and accepted a post-graduate place at the Royal College of Art, where in his second year he was awarded a Royal Scholarship and was a contemporary of a number of now better-known names including David Hockney. Ingham applied for and received a Leverhulme travel award to explore the sites of the great Renaissance painters, and spent many happy months engaged in this expedition. He spent time at the English Art school in Rome, where he lived well and busied himself the same studio that Barbara Hepworth had used. At this stage of his career, Ingham consciously rejected the prospect of pursuing a career as an establishment artist, although the RA was open to him, and he went to live in remote cottage in Cornwall. The subsequent years were varied and highly productive, and Ingham's personal artistic voice emerged in his oeuvre in the form of an always-developing dialogue with influences both of landscape and other artists of every age. His preoccupation with etching resulted in several hundred plates, some very large, and the results are as unmistakable as they are varied, but invariably of outstanding quality. He produced a number of sculptures in bronze and in plaster, while his lifelong output of paintings remained small but again of very high quality. He taught etching regularly until about 5 years before his death, latterly at Falmouth Art School, and also at Farnham Art College. During the late eighties he established a relationship with the art dealer Francis Graham-Dixon, who had a London gallery. This meant that his paintings were professionally marketed for the first time, and prices for his work rose steadily in the last ten years of his life, and subsequently. He was able to purchase a cottage in Helston for his parents, who lived there until their deaths. He then moved into a fine set of converted-barn studios with a patch of garden, quietly situated off the High St in Helston, and it was here, on 22 September 1997, that he died, having quietly suffered from cancer for nearly a year. Condition: Generally very good, scrapes to board as intended by artist. Framed. If you'd like to know more, please email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056.
  • John Piper C.H. (1903-1992)

    Garn Fawr

    Watercolour and gouache on paper; executed 1969 37 x 54 cm Titled and dated lower left ‘Garn Fawr 12 VIII 69′; signed lower right. It was Piper's wife, Myfanwy - whom he met whilst she lived in London with her Welsh family - who first introduced Piper to West Wales in the 1930s. The Pembrokeshire landscape became his muse, as it also did for Graham Sutherland, another great neo-romantic painter. Having lived in various parts of Wales during the post-war period, the Pipers bought a cottage by Garn Fawr, on the Pembrokeshire Coas, in 1962. The volcanic outcrop was the site of an Iron Age hill fort, and had also been used as a high-viewpoint during the First World War. Piper started out as a mostly abstract artist, but by the 1960s he had moved more towards realism, often focusing on depicting architecture. Here, Piper paints the wet Welsh countryside. Each of the fields is complete with its own crop; the different plants and flowers are designated by characteristic splashes of dark colour. For other works by the artist and biographical details, click here. If you are interested, please email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056.
  • John Piper (1903 - 1992)

    Cartoon for Baptistry Chapel Window, Coventry Cathedral

      Gouache and mixed media art 127 x 54 cm Labelled B101 by the artist and initialled. A gouache design for one of the Coventry Cathedral Baptistry Window panels. John Piper was commissioned to design the Baptistry Window in 1955, in partnership with glassmaker Patrick Reyntiens. The window is made of 198 panels of stained glass and is 26 metres high.

    Piper commented in his book “Stained Glass: Art or Anti-Art?” that ‘The function, the flesh and blood and bones of stained glass – its whole being – is to gratify light and to intensify atmosphere in a room or building, not necessarily to provide colour – or a message.’ The ambiguous post-war tenor of the design is striking: the khaki palette, the soldier-like figure, and the landscape evoking a 20th century theatre of war.

    John Piper CH was an English painter, printmaker, and designer of stained-glass windows. His work often focused on the British landscape, especially churches and monuments, and included tapestry designs, book jackets, screen-prints, photography, fabrics and ceramics. Condition: very good. Four pin holes and a small handling mark mid left. If you are interested, please email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056. Click here for other works by John Piper.
  • Bryan Ingham (1936-1997)

    Upright Jug (1993-95)

    Pencil and oil on board 64 x 19 cm Provenance: Bohun Galleries, Paintings in Hospitals. Signed, titled and dated 1993-95 (on backboard). Bryan Ingham was born in Yorkshire. For his National Service he joined the RAF, and spent his time in Germany as an airman. After demobilisation, his final report included the statement that "Ingham is an artistic sort of airman." In his spare time he had started painting in oils, and by the time he left the RAF he had completed a large number of paintings. He studied at St Martin's School of Art in London, where he had the tuition of a fine post-war generation of teachers who helped him to hone his draughtsmanship and other skills, and he swiftly showed a capacity for painting that drew the attention of his tutors and peers. On graduating he was offered and accepted a post-graduate place at the Royal College of Art, where in his second year he was awarded a Royal Scholarship and was a contemporary of a number of now better-known names including David Hockney. Ingham applied for and received a Leverhulme travel award to explore the sites of the great Renaissance painters, and spent many happy months engaged in this expedition. He spent time at the English Art school in Rome, where he lived well and busied himself the same studio that Barbara Hepworth had used. At this stage of his career, Ingham consciously rejected the prospect of pursuing a career as an establishment artist, although the RA was open to him, and he went to live in remote cottage in Cornwall. The subsequent years were varied and highly productive, and Ingham's personal artistic voice emerged in his oeuvre in the form of an always-developing dialogue with influences both of landscape and other artists of every age. His preoccupation with etching resulted in several hundred plates, some very large, and the results are as unmistakable as they are varied, but invariably of outstanding quality. He produced a number of sculptures in bronze and in plaster, while his lifelong output of paintings remained small but again of very high quality. He taught etching regularly until about 5 years before his death, latterly at Falmouth Art School, and also at Farnham Art College. During the late eighties he established a relationship with the art dealer Francis Graham-Dixon, who had a London gallery. This meant that his paintings were professionally marketed for the first time, and prices for his work rose steadily in the last ten years of his life, and subsequently. He was able to purchase a cottage in Helston for his parents, who lived there until their deaths. He then moved into a fine set of converted-barn studios with a patch of garden, quietly situated off the High St in Helston, and it was here, on 22 September 1997, that he died, having quietly suffered from cancer for nearly a year. If you'd like to know more, please email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056. Condition: Generally excellent; framed.
  • Terry Frost (1915-2003)

    Autumnal Landscape in Red, Black and Yellow

    Watercolour 40 x 58 cm Signed and dated 1958 Framed in hand-finished grey 'Nicholson' butt-jointed frame. Click here for biographical details and other works by the artist. If you are interested email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056. In 1954 Frost moved to Leeds to become Gregory Fellow at the University. This began a period when he painted yellow and black and white paintings, inspired by the Yorkshire landscape. In 1958 he joined the London group and then moved to St Ives. This painting dates to this era.
  • Julian Trevelyan (1910-1988)

    Cretan Windmills (1964)

    Oil on canvas 61 x 77 cm Peasants and a donkey, followed by a cow and goat, travel along the Cretan shore. Windmills dominate the shoreline - Julian Trevelyan was markedly inspired by the windmills he saw while visiting Crete in the 1960s. The composition is substantially made up of triangular forms; the inverted floating pyramid hovers above the flashing blades of the windmills. Combined with the man, woman, and donkey  in the foreground, the pyramid detail suggests Mary and Joseph’s Flight into Egypt. Click here for biographical details and other works by the artist. If you are interested email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056.
  • Julian Trevelyan (1910-1988)

    New York Bridges (1982)

    Oil on canvas 76 x 61 cm (29.9 x 24 in.) In artist's original wooden frame. Provenance: the estate of Mary Fedden from the estate of her husband Julian Trevelyan. Click here for biographical details and other works by the artist. If you are interested email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056.
  • Blair Hughes-Stanton (1902-1981) Reclining Nude, c. 1936

    Tempera on canvas 76.5 x 102cm Signed lower right 'Blair H S'. Provenance: The estate of the artist. A magnificent abstract nude rendered in a dynamic colour palette. This is probably Hughes-Stanton's most important work, and belongs to the nation's great, if brief, period of British Surrealism. The three major elements are distinct: the pastel tones of the window view and wall, the sensual curvatures of the pale nude, and the bold foreground featuring a fantastically accomplished still life of a fruit bowl (which could be a painting in and of itself) and the impressively phallic chair back. This is a brilliant example of erotic modernist abstraction. Blair Hughes-Stanton, son of the artist Sir Herbert Hughes-Stanton, was a noted British artist of the interwar period. At the age of 13 he joined the Royal Navy training ship HMS Coway, but at 19 - advised by his father - he abandoned the sea for his paintbox. He studied art at Byam Shaw School (1919-1922) where he was influenced by Leon Underwood (who was a major influence throughout his studying), Royal Academy Schools (1922-23), and Leon Underwood's School (1923-25). He was celebrated mostly for his skills as an engraver, and was a founding member of the English Wood Engraving Society when it was established in 1925. His first wife was the printmaker Gertrude Hermes with whom he illustrated John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress in 1928. In 1931 he became head of the Gregynog Press, later establishing the Gemini Press with his second wife Ida Graves. During the course of his career he worked in various media, though his art frequently focused on the female nude. He taught at Westminster School of Art (1934-39), Colchester School of Art (1945-47); St Martin's School of Art (1947-48); and Central School of Arts and Crafts (1948-80). His teaching career was interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served as a camofleur and then joined the Royal Engineers (ignoring his earlier life in the Navy). Serving in Greece, he was captured as a prisoner of war and was imprisoned in a camp. He returned to England after the war. If you’d like to know more, please email info@manningfineart.co.uk or call us on 07929 749056.

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