Two of the Scotland’s finest women artists, Anne Redpath and Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, are strongly represented in the year’s Scottish Sale at Bonhams on 17 August.
Redpath’s beautiful and subtle view of Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera painted in the late 1930s (£60,000 – 80,000) is one of the artist’s first major “hill town” oils rendered in the characteristic chalky palette of the period. Another work from her ‘white period’, ‘Still Life with Michaelmas Daisies’ (£30,000 – 50,000) employs Redpath’s favoured motifs of the arc of a table, crockery and cropped jug.
‘Houses on the Lagoon, Murano’ (£30,000 – 50,000) by contrast is a very late work from 1964, when according to many commentators, her painting achieved a purity in which form and content had become inseparable. These qualities are also evident in two scintillating Portuguese paintings, ‘In a Baroque Church Lisbon’ (£15,000 – 20,000) and ‘In the Church of Madre Deus Lisbon.’(£10,000 – 15,000). Redpath, a Protestant by upbringing, had first been introduced to Catholic imagery in her early 20s and this influence resurfaced in some of the work of her maturity.
Dame Elizabeth is represented by a characteristically delicate Japanese influenced watercolour of a lily (£800 – 1,200) and two gloriously colourful works from 1965, ‘Harbour, Antibes’ (£5,000 – 7,000) and ‘Three Bathers’ (£3,000 – 4,000).
For further sale information please go to www.bonhams.com/scotland
