Record prices for Grosvenor artists at print auction

Records tumbled at Bonhams sale of linocut prints by Grosvenor School artists, featured in this column last week.

For Claude Flight, the central figure and teacher at the school, the previous 26,000 auction record was broken three times, led by Speed, an image of red London buses hurtling down Regent Street in the 1920s, which sold to an American private collector for 49,250.

A British private collector paid 82,850 for Sybil Andrews’s classic of motorbike racers, Speedway. This briefly held the record for any Grosvenor School print until, with the final lot of the sale, The Gust of Wind (pictured), by the Australian artist Ethel Spowers, blew away its 15,000 to 20,000 estimate to sell for 114,500 to another American collector.

Even the lesser-known Grosvenor artists were in demand, such as Ursula Fookes, whose view of a mining town soared over its 1,000 estimate to sell for 9,000. Such prices sent dealers scurrying back to their stock books to revalue their holdings in time for the opening of the London Original Print Fair.

From this week, Leighton House Museum in Holland Park hosts the first display of works from the collection of John Schaeffer, one of the most important collectors of Victorian art in the last 40 years.

The history of how Schaeffer, a highly successful businessman in Australia, fell in love with Victorian art, amassed a huge collection, then sold much of it following a painful divorce, only to continue buying and rebuild the collection, will make fascinating reading one day.

At Leighton House half of the works on show were bought at a Christie’s sale of the Forbes collection in 2003, just when many professionals thought he was out of the market.

The sale was rated a huge success and Schaeffer, unknown to most, was part of that. While he did pay record prices for some of the artists - Richard Redgrave, Thomas Faed, James Archer and John Linnell, he also snapped up bargains by Waterhouse and Holman Hunt at half their estimated prices. Schaeffer’s relationship with Leighton House has been a fruitful one.

The museum now owns three key paintings by GF Watts and Frederic Leighton that were previously owned by Schaeffer.

This time last year a drawing of a fishing boat on a beach by Lucian Freud sold at Sotheby’s for a record 2.6 million. Even more astonishing was the fact that it sold not to a wealthy private collector, but to the dealer Jean-Luc Baroni, who has a gallery in London run by his daughter, Novella.

Probably better known for handling Old Masters, the Baronis were giving notice that modern art was their field, too, so long as the quality was right. But could they re-sell a Freud drawing at that price level?

The answer is yes, because at the Salon du Dessin, the drawings fair in Paris this month, Baroni offered the drawing at 3.3 million, and sold it.