Update on Parker Fine Art on 7th February

  

There appears to be a definite trend which is in favour of the artists that readers of Modern Printmakers admire. Or, rather I should say, in favour of readers themselves, because the results at Parker's yesterday confirm that if you buy unfashionable art, you will get a bargain. That the William Lee Hankey watercolour and pencil sketch I wrote about this week only managed to achieve £190 is a sign of the times. Lee Hankey is a mixed bag. His models are often awkwardly posed, he can be trite, he can tend to be a costume-drama specialist. But £190 makes little sense.

Loup-de-mer (top) is a good example of the kind of work by him you could look out for, namely a portrait study and a male subject. With its skill, stylishness and sense of a character-part, Lee Hankey's sea-dog ticks the Lee Hankey boxes. But men are less appealing than women and here Lee Hankey tells it straight. Again someone tripped up by translating the French literally as sea-wolf, but that should tell you a lot about auction-houses and the mistakes they make. His Goose-girl (above) would do better I am sure but the genre manner lets him down. Nor can Lee Hankey resist giving the picture a strong dose of chic. The young lady may have been a goose-girl at one time (and may even be the same girl who posed at the age of five for E.C.A. Brown) but she is now playing the Lee Hankey part of lovely young woman with dressed hair and negligent blouse. This over-worked picture also made £53,000 at Christies twenty years ago and shows just what a bargain the buyer had yesterday

Even less fashionable apparently is poor Wilfred Fairclough. I decided to use a photograph of Fairclough in his etching studio to emphasise the professionalism and skill of this artist. How come his Orchard Farm only made fifty quid? This would have been an ebay price at one time. But fifty pounds for each one of his etchings? Just compare Charles Mackie reaching £800 and draw your own conclusions. By comparison, the Mackie was over-priced. Take it from me, Fairclough is a little master of printmaking, Mackie is not. The interest of the Mackie lies as much as anything in the period value and the way he was breaking with convention. The moral remains as it was in the eighties - go for skill, go for the unobtrusive.