Frieze Masters 2026 (SOLD)

Signed with initials l.l.: E.A., watercolour over traces of pencil heightened with bodycolour and stopping out, with touches of red chalk, in a period burr maple frame Sheet 38.9 x 27.6 cm.; 15 ¼ x 10 ¾ inches, painted area 33 x 18 cm.; 13 x 7 inches Provenance Christie’s, London, 3 February 2000, lot 160; Sotheby’s, Gleneagles, 30 August 2000, lot 1153; Private collection, London until 2023 Alexander is best known for his exquisite watercolours of flora, fauna and the natural world. Alexander studied at the Royal Institution, Edinburgh from 1887-8, and in Paris with the sculptor Emmanuel Frémier. In 1887-8 the artist travelled to Tangier with his father and fellow artists Pollock Nisbet and Joseph Crawhall. He returned to Egypt in 1892 and lived there for four years. After his return he married Dora, moved to just outside Musselburgh, and created a menagerie that he used for his work. Plants remained important subjects for his painting and, in 1909, he illustrated J. H. Crawford’s The Wild Flowers. In 1902 Alexander was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy becoming a full member in 1913. He exhibited widely including at the Royal Scottish Academy, Royal Academy, Fine Art Society, Royal Watercolour Society and the Leicester Galleries. Alexander’s work is held in the Tate Gallery, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Dundee Art Gallery and by Fife Council.

Brigadier Twemlow’s Bengali Servant in an interior Signed l.r. and l.l. with initials, inscribed verso in pen and brown ink: Brigr. Twemlow’s/Bengali Servant./W.C., grey and brown washes over pencil 27.3 x 22 cm.; 10 ¾ x 8 5/8 inches Framed size 34 x 29 cm.; 13 ½ x 11 ¼ inches Chapman was born in London. He studied at the East India Company’s Military Seminary at Addiscombe, where he won several exam prizes. After a year at Chatham he joined the Bombay Engineers. As Second Assistant in the Department of Roads and tanks he took charge of the works on the Agra road from the foot of the Thull Ghaut to Candore from 1846, receiving much praise for his work. He married Brigadier Twemlow’s second daughter Charlotte in Aurungabad in June 1848. After a leave of absence spent researching engineering projects in England in 1851, he joined the Institution of Civil Engineers as an Associate Member. On his return to India in October 1852, he was appointed to the survey of the construction of a canal between the Indus and Kurrachee. He concluded that a railway line would offer greater advantages. While investigating this he had a fatal accident on the river Indus in December 853. After his untimely death the road he had worked on was renamed Chapman Road, Thull Ghaut. Brigadier Twemlow (1796 - 1877) of the Royal (Bengal) Artillery was the commandant at Aurungabad (Nizam’s Contingent) who had a distinguished military career in India from 1812. He lived in a bungalow at Roza, ‘an old Mohammedan tomb surrounded by a walled garden’, (Francis Egerton, ‘Journal of a Winter’s tour in India’, 1852, vol. II, p. 225). He returned to England in 1853 and devoted himself to scientific and archaeological pursuits. Ayah and Child outside a bungalow Signed l.l. W.C., inscribed verso in pencil: Ayah & child./Egeltana (?)April 180/4 9, watercolour over pencil 25.5 x 20.5 cm.; 9 7/8 x 8 1/8 inches Framed size 33 x 28cm.; 13 x 11 inches (2)

Evelyn De Morgan (1855 – 1919) The head of a woman Coloured chalks on buff paper 35.8 x 23.4 cm.; 14 1/8 x 9 ¼ inches Provenance Private collection U.K., by descent until 2024. This beautiful drawing of the head of a woman deep in thought may be a study for the figure of Purity in De Morgan’s 1914 painting 'The Vision', also known as ‘1914', an allegorical painting inspired by World War I. The work depicts two women representing Peace and Purity in the foreground, with a demon representing war behind them (private collection, with the Louise Whitford Gallery/David Hughes in 1981). De Morgan was a pacifist, deeply moved by the horrors of the Boer War (1899-1902) and World War I, who made over fifteen paintings criticising war.

KT379 Signed and dated l.l.: John Dearman 1845, signed and inscribed on stretcher: Cattle crossing Merrow Down Guilford Surrey/storm passing off.Jn. Dearman 184., oil on paper laid down on canvas stamped PREPARED BY/CHARLES ROBERSON/LONG ACRE LONDON 18 x 15.4 cm.; 7 x 6 1/8 inches Frame size 28 x 26 cm.; 11 x 10 inches Provenance Christie’s, London (1002V); John Abbott (1937-2011) This delightful oil sketch captures a huge brooding sky with distant light breaking through which suggests that the storm is passing. The grandeur of nature is enhanced by the small figure of a shepherd with a flash of red at his neck, with his dog and flock of sheep, which draw the eye to the foreground. Virtuoso handling of the impasto of the landscape in the middle distance show the work of an artist spontaneously enjoying his paint. Dearman also records the weather effects on the stretcher in his neat hand. The artist lived in Camberwell, London in the 1830s and had a house in Guilford High Street. He exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1824-1856 and also showed often at the Royal Society of British Artists and the British Institution.

Signed, inscribed and dated l.r.: Hindoo Temple near Dehra/Himmalayas in the background-/Oct. 1869./C.F.G.C., watercolour over pencil with touches of white. Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand, is in the foothills of the Himalayas. On the banks of a river is a Hindu temple in front of which figures ride elephants through the shallow waters. On the riverbank, a woman performs the aarti, releasing a diya to float upon the waters as an offering. For further work by this artist please see the catalogue link and enquire about availability

Signed l.r.: Helleu, black, red and white chalks 70 x 48.5 cm; 27 1⁄2 x 19 inches Provenance Nevill Keating Pictures Ltd., London; Private collection until 2022 This elegant drawing aux trois crayons of the artist’s wife Alice, drawn from behind, is recorded in the online archive of Les Amis de Paul-César Helleu as PCH DE1-3216. Helleu studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1876 in the atelier of Jean-Léon Gerome. In Paris, his circle of intimate friends included fellow artists Giovanni Boldini, Alfred Stevens, Edgar Degas, Rodin, Claude Monet and notably the Americans Whistler and Sargent, with whom he briefly shared a studio. Helleu exhibited several large pastel portraits to great acclaim at the Salons of 1885 and 1886, including one of Alice Louis-Guérin, to whom he became engaged in 1885. He and Alice married in 1886 at the church of Saint-Pierre in Neuilly. Although friendly with many of the Impressionist painters and invited by Degas to participate in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition of 1886, Helleu declined to do so. He exhibited six pastels at the Salon des Pastellistes at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1887, including two further portraits of Alice. At this time he first met Comte Robert de Montesquieu, who was to become his leading patron and who, in 1913, published the first important monograph on the artist. In 1889 Paul and Alice Helleu spent some time with Sargent at Fladbury in England, and he made several studies of Alice and an oil of Paul painting her (Brooklyn Museum, New York). The 1890s were a successful decade for Helleu, who moved comfortably in society in both France and England. He obtained numerous lucrative portrait commissions and enjoyed considerable financial success. Helleu also met and enjoyed a long friendship with Marcel Proust, who is thought to have based the character of the painter Elstir in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu on him. Encouraged by Sargent, Helleu began travelling to America in 1902, where his reputation had preceded him, and he enjoyed further success drawing elegant Society women. His subjects included the Comtesse Greffulhe, Queen Alexandra and Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough. These works were greatly admired by his contemporaries. His preferred subject remained Alice, whom he drew many times. The writer Edmond de Goncourt wrote of Alice Helleu that [s]he was incapable of making a movement that was not graceful and elegant, and ten times a day he [Paul-César Helleu] tried to capture those movements with a quick drypoint sketch. In 1931, four years after Helleu’s death, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris. Today his work can be found in many museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

William Henry Hunt, OWS (1790-1864) Lighting the Brazier Signed l.l.: W HUNT., watercolour over traces of pencil with scratching out, title inscribed on original frame 36.2 x 26.7 cm.; 14 ¼ x 10 ½ inches Provenance Agnew’s, Liverpool, no. 253; Malllams, Oxford, 19 March 2026, lot 443 This unpublished watercolour is a notable addition to the group of black subjects drawn by W.H. Hunt held in public collections in the UK and USA. It fits into a group on which Hunt was working in 1830s depicting black children warming themselves by fires. For domestic servants lighting fires was a daily job. In the 1830s Hunt exhibited twenty humorous images of children which were later lithographed as Hunt’s Comic Sketches published in 1844, including two of black children, including Master James Crow -Out of His Element and Miss Jim Ima Crow seated by fires. The Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, has the original watercolour of Jim Crow which appears to show the same black boy as in the present work (see J. Witt, William Henry Hunt (1790-1846), 1982, no.477, see lithograph). Both boys are shown seated in front of a brazier, a suggestion that they feel the cold alluded to in the title of the lithograph, seated on a barrel or basket of the same height. The present watercolour (executed circa 1830-40) also has similarities with a watercolour of the same black model holding a slate at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London also entitled ‘A Brown Study’ (FA526). Both drawings share the same neutral background and have an added strip at the top. Another version of this work, without an added strip, is in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art (B1975.4.583). Hunt made several other studies of black sitters, including a drawing of a young girl in pencil on buff paper in the Courtauld Institute, London and a boy posing as a boxer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2020.120). Jan Marsh has suggested that because of Hunt’s choice of theme his sitters are most likely to have been youths aged around 10 – 14 years old who were not at school or apprenticed but earning small amounts in the street running errands, carrying parcels and doing other small jobs, and were therefore visible and available to artists notably in London, Bristol and Liverpool (private email March 2026). Hunt preferred to use the same sitters as models. Hunt was born with a deformation of his legs which restricted his movement and seems to have had a form of dwarfism. According to his early biographer, F. G. Stephens, Hunt was: ‘was a little less than… five foot. He was broad as well as round shouldered and his head was large beyond proportion to the rest of his figure which the torso was that of a larger man. His large and long frock coats and loose trousers although favourable to him on other accounts, did not add to his outward graces.’ . Stephens adds that Hunt’s personal disabilities: ‘frequently made him reserved and not very easily accessible to strangers.’ While Hunt’s interactions with black sitters were inevitably informed by the prejudices of his age it is quite possible that his own disability drew him to marginalised members of his society. He is known to have befriended black acrobats and musicians. British artists showed increasing interest in Black subjects during the 1830s. Slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire over the years 1833 -1838 and the abolition movement was hotly debated in Parliament and beyond.

Pencil 26.5 x 18 cm.; 10 1⁄2 x 7 1/8 inches Provenance Estate of the artist (his daughter Henrietta Phipps), until 2000; Davis & Langdale Company, New York, 2000; Private collection, from 2000 until 2023 Exhibited: Davis & Langdale Company, New York, 2000, Henry Lamb: Works on Paper, no. 13 [checklist] This compelling drawing was executed around 1930. Henry Lamb was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1883, shortly before his father moved the family to Manchester, where he spent his childhood. He studied medicine before abandoning this path to be an artist. At twenty-two he left for London to study under Augustus John and William Orpen at their Chelsea Art School. John was a particularly formative influence and Lamb moved to Paris with him a few years later. Lamb spent a couple of summers on the south coast of Brittany, in search of a more traditional way of life. This impulse drew Lamb to Gola Island in Northern Ireland two years later. In London in 1905, Lamb joined the Fitzroy Street Group and was a founding member of both the Camden Town Group and the London Group. He married Nina Forrest, or Euphemia, in 1906 but the marriage proved short-lived. He was friendly with the Bloomsbury Group, having known Vanessa Stephen and Clive Bell from his early days in London, but he often had little patience with them. He was close friends with the eminent critic and biographer Lytton Strachey and between 1912 and 1914 he painted his portrait, now held in the Tate and one of his greatest works. In the First World War, Lamb served as a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France, Salonika and Palestine; he was awarded the Military Cross. He was not an official war artist but drew extensively and the resulting oils are an important part of his oeuvre. In 1928 he married Lady Pansy Pakenham and moved to Coombe Bissett in Wiltshire. Lamb was appointed an official war artist for the Second World War, making portraits of soldiers and studies of servicemen at work across the South of England. Lamb was elected as an associate of the Royal Academy and a Trustee of both the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate at this time. He was finally awarded full membership of the Royal Academy in 1949. Interest in Lamb’s work has revived in recent years, and he has been the subject of recent exhibitions at Salisbury Museum and Poole Museum. His work can be found in many collections around the world, including the Tate, the Imperial War Museum, the Government Art Collection and the National Gallery of Canada.

Dated l.l.: 1 PM. Jan 2 1867, numbered l.r.: 130 and inscribed with colour notes, pen and brown ink and watercolour heightened with bodycolour on buff paper 8 x 24.5 cm.; 3 1/8 x 9 5/8 inches Provenance Spink (K3/4703) This watercolour dates from Lear’s second trip up the Nile and his third visit to Egypt in the winter of 1866-1867, when he travelled with his Canadian cousin, Archie Jones. The men met in Luxor and visited Esneh, Edfu and Denderah, and had reached Philae by the end of January. Lear found his cousin irritating due to his habit of whistling and his lack of enthusiasm for the temples.

Sara Page (1855-1943) Portrait of Marie Signed l.l.: S Page, inscribed u.l.: MARIE, pastel, label attached verso: Papeterie F. Dupré, 141 Faubourg St Honoré, Paris 46 x 38 cm.; 18 x 15 inches Literature Olga Baird (Yatsenko), Sara Wells Page (1855-1943): a Parisian artist from Wolverhampton, 2022, p. 12 (ill). Sara Page was born in Moxley, Staffordshire, the fourth child of Samuel Page, a successful timber merchant, and his wife Sara Wells Page, the daughter of a wealthy local ironmaster. Her parents died in the 1870s leaving her and her siblings financially independent. From 1884-1891 she studied drawing at Wolverhampton School of Art and then travelled to Italy to continue her artistic education, making copies in oil after originals in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. She was photographed in Venice by the photographers Fratelli Vianelli. In 1892, having been encouraged by Sir Frederick Leighton, Page went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian, under Bouguereau, Tony Robert-Fleury and Gabriel Ferrier. Male and female students received the same training which included drawing from live models, the sexes taught in separate ateliers. One of the ateliers for female students was at 5 rue de Berri. Page wrote that she ‘worked under the best French artists at the Académie Julian and found there both guidance and much interest in the companionship of many different nations, and as all the students (about 500) competed in efforts for the medal in painting and sculpture, life was animated’25. Page received a medal for portrait painting.

Signed and dated l.r.: S:Stone 1788, inscribed in pen and brown ink verso: Sam: Lysons., watercolour with gum arabic and touches of bodycolour on wove paper 37 x 30 cm.; 14 1⁄2 x 11 3⁄4 inches Provenance Probably Samuel Lysons, FSA (1763-1819); Henry Rogers Broughton, 2nd Baron Fairhaven (1900-1973); By family descent; Sotheby’s, London, sale of the Library of Henry Rogers Broughton, 2nd Baron Fairhaven, Part II, 29 November 2022, lot 478 Sarah Stone was the first female British painter of birds and animals to achieve professional recognition. Her drawings of birds are a highly important visual record of the specimens held in collections in late eighteenth-century England, and include some of specimens collected on the voyages of Captain Cook. The Mandarin drake from China (Aix galericulata) is shown raising the fan-shaped, cinnamon coloured innermost pair of secondary wings on his back like sails in a courting gesture. Stone evidently admired the Mandarin duck as she made several versions of the present drawing. One is in the Natural History Museum, London (see Christine Jackson, Sarah Stone Natural Curiosities from the New Worlds, 1998, p. 113, NHML no. 54, ill. Pl. 54 p. 81). Another, smaller version dated 1781 (in poor condition) was sold at Bonhams, London, 12 October 2022, lot 3. Stone was employed when she was still in her mid-teens to draw the objects in the Holophusican or Leverian Museum, a major cultural institution of the day housed in the former royal palace of Leicester House. She was to work there for nearly thirty years. Its owner, Sir Ashton Lever (1729-1788) commissioned her by 1777 to record specimens and ethnographic material brought back by British expeditions to Australia, the Americas, Africa and the Far East. For financial reasons, Lever had to dispose of his collection in the 1780s, by lottery. Before doing so, he apparently commissioned Sarah Stone to depict the birds, ethnography and antiquities. From January to March 1784 Lever exhibited Stone’s work, advertising the show as: ‘a large Room of Transparent Drawings from the most curious specimens in the collection, consisting of above one thousand different articles, executed by Miss Stone, a young lady who is allowed by all Artists to have succeeded in the effort beyond imagination. These will continue to be open for the inspection of the public until they are removed into the country. Admittance HALF-A-CROWN each...Good fires in all the galleries.’ (See C. Jackson, ibid, p. 22). Lever kept Stone’s drawings after the exhibition. The Leverian Museum continued to grow under new ownership through the 1780s and 1790s, and Stone continued to work there. Stone drew items from other private collections and the British Museum. As most of the actual specimens have not survived, her drawings are a vital record of contemporary collections, few of which produced catalogues, and give valuable insight into the collecting practises of Enlightenment museums. Sarah’s father James Stone was a fan painter, and it is likely that Sarah assisted him. As a child she was taught to make her own pigments using natural ingredients. She practised working in bodycolour as well as watercolour as a child, and the exquisite brushwork which can be seen in the drawing of the feathers of the duck demonstrates her skill at using bodycolour and gum arabic to intensify the colours. Stone exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1781, 1785 and 1786. She exhibited paintings of birds at the Society of Artists in 1791. She married John Langdale Smith, a midshipman, on 8 September 1789; she exhibited as a ‘painter’ before her marriage and in her married name as an ‘Honorary Exhibitor.’ She painted less after her marriage, predominately drawing live birds which her husband, also an artist, brought back from his travels. Stone was twenty seven when she married. A, daughter Eliza, who probably died in infancy, was baptised in September 1792 at St John the Evangelist, Westminster. A son, Henry Stone Smith (1795-1881) was baptised in the same church in March 1795. The family has a note by him recording a bird ‘Topial’, probably a troupial, which was brought back from the West Indies by his father and lived with the family (see C. Jackson, ibid, p. 30). Further examples of Stone’s watercolours can be found in the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, London, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, the Yale Center for British Art, the Getty, the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii and the Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand. Paris Spies-Gans has written about Stone’s participation in the imperial project in Paul Mellon Centre Notes, No. 20, ‘Colonialism in the Photographic Archive’, January 2022, pp. 11-12). Samuel Lysons, FSA (1763-1819) The inscription on the reverse of the drawing suggests it was owned by Samuel Lysons, FSA. Lysons was a Gloucestershire antiquarian, engraver and archaeologist, whose interests centred on Roman archaeology and mosaics and Gloucestershire church architecture. He was the Director of the Society of Antiquaries from 1798 to 1809. He illustrated his brother Daniel Lysons’ Environs of London, and the two collaborated on Magna Britannia, Being a Concise Topographical Account of the Several Counties of Great Britain, published in several volumes from 1806 to 1822. Henry Rogers Broughton (1900-1973) Henry Rogers Broughton succeeded his older brother Urban Huttlestone Broughton as the 2nd Lord Fairhaven in 1966. He was born in the United States and educated at Harrow, before joining the Royal Horse Guards in 1920. Their father, English emigré Urban Broughton (1857-1929), had a successful career building sewerage systems in the USA in the 1890s and married Carla Leland Rogers (1867-1939). She was the daughter of the wealthy oil and railroad tycoon Henry Huttlestone Rogers (184-1909). In 1912 the family moved to London. The title Lord Fairhaven was awarded to Urban for his political activities, but he died before he could use it and his eldest son Huttlestone became the first Baron Fairhaven. Both brothers were great collectors and Henry put together one of the largest twentieth-century collections of depictions of natural history. He left a large bequest of one hundred and twenty flower paintings, over nine hundred watercolours and drawings and forty-four volumes of drawings by botanical artists such as Redouté and Ehret to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (the Broughton Bequest). The brothers’ home, Angelsey Abbey near Cambridge, with its large natural history collection, was left to the National Trust in 1966.

Signed and inscribed verso: Far away in Cloudland/BWSpiers/And when the smoke ascends on high/Then thou behold'st the vanity of worldly stuff/Gone with a puff/thus think, and smoke tobacco-/G.W.-Smoking Spiritualised, watercolour over pencil heightened with gum arabic and touches of white, and further inscribed on original backing: B.W. Spiers Far Away 13.5 x 18cm; 5 1/2 x 7 1/8 inches Benjamin Walter Spiers (1845-1894) was an idiosyncratic painter of studio still lives who lived in London, at 70 Hereford Road in Bayswater, where the current watercolour may have been drawn. He crammed his antiquarian pictures with books, furniture, objects and paintings a number of which reappear in several of his still lifes. He often drew corners of interiors of his favourite antique shops in London’s Wardour Street. The bust and the chair shown in the present work appear in several of his compositions. He was captured here by an artist with the initials G W who has caught him relaxing with a cigarette in his studio. Spiers often penned a verse to accompany a picture, as in the present work. It is amusing seeing the tables turned and the artist drawn as the subject of his own studio interior. Spiers’ extraordinary fidelity in his own painting and his eclectic taste makes him the leading exponent of a particular type of 19th century interior painting. The dealer and scholar Christopher Wood considered him to be ‘one of the most remarkable painters of still-life in English Art’ (see C. Wood, ‘Knicknacks and silly Old Books’, 'Country Life', 10 June 1993, pp. 124-125). Christie’s London had a large group of Spiers work for sale on 14 December 2016. In one of these works 'Worthless old knickknacks and silly old books', based on the poem 'The Cane-Bottom'd Chair' by Thackeray, the same painting of Gainsborough's (lost) 'Cottage Children', which hangs over the fireplace in the present work, can be seen. Spiers was interested in possessions rather than objects of nature and his curiosity for antiquarian objects, books, maps, prints and china is displayed with trompe-l’oeil accuracy in his watercolours. The same objects repeatedly appear which suggests that Spiers owned them. Little is known about Spiers’ life. He lived in London, first at 17 Hereford Street, Bayswater, and then at Longwood in Acol Road, West Hampstead. He is thought to be related to Richard Phené Spiers, the architect, whose brother, Walter Spiers was a curator of the Soane Museum. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1876 to 1891, and 'The Times' Academy notice for 27 June 1881 says of his two exhibited works, ‘We consider these two works to be the gems of the water- colour gallery.’ Christie’s London 14 December 2019, lot 80