Another Barns-Graham sold in Sothebys Bowie Collection Auction

A 1949 painting from Davie Bowie Collection has sold for £62,500 – Another Great Price

Sothebys have sold a second painting by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in Part II of the auctioning off of David Bowie’s art collection. At £62,500 it achieved well beyond the presale estimate of £12 – 18,000. This is a fine painting which shows Barns-Graham’s growing tendencies towards abstraction. This is clearly seen in the treatment of the stone wall at the front of the image, which is offset against a simplified landscape. Note the minimal description of the buildings in the middleground, that are quite loosely defined, and the play of hard edge shapes (stone dyke enclosures) against the curvature of the sloping fields in thebackground. The semblance of the landscape is well captured though the image can not be said to be a realistic representation.

This painting shows that Barns-Graham has gone far in establishing her own personal vision of Cornwall since arriving there in 1940 and, as executed in 1949, that this is the platform from which she develops her imagery further in the next decade.