For Immediate Release Press Release London London | +44 (0)20 7293 6000 | Mitzi Mina | [email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected]Sarah Rustin | [email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected]om om om Sotheby’s London To Offer the Greatest Collection of 20 th -Century British Art Ever to Come to the Market: The Evill/Frost Collection A Private Collection of Exceptional Works By Modern British Masters Including Lucian Freud, Henry Moore, Stanley Spencer and Edward Burra – Many Not Seen in a Generation and Never Previously Offered for Sale ––Includes the Largest and Most Important Group of Works by Stanley Spencer Ever To Be Offered at Auction –Workmen in the House, Stanley Spencer, 1935 SOTHEBY’S LONDON, Monday 7 th February 2011, today announces the sale of the greatest collection of 20 th -Century British Art ever to come to the market: The Evill/Frost Collection, a stand- alone three-part sale which launches with an Evening Sale on Wednesday 15 th June 2011. This
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Sotheby’s London To Offer the Greatest Collection of20th-Century British Art Ever to Come to the Market:
The Evill/Frost Collection
A Private Collection of Exceptional WorksBy Modern British Masters Including Lucian Freud,
Henry Moore, Stanley Spencer and Edward Burra– Many Not Seen in a Generation and Never Previously
Offered for Sale –
– Includes the Largest and Most Important Group of Worksby Stanley Spencer Ever To Be Offered at Auction –
Workmen in the House, Stanley Spencer, 1935
SOTHEBY’S LONDON, Monday 7th February 2011, today announces the sale of the greatest
collection of 20th-Century British Art ever to come to the market: The Evill/Frost Collection, a stand-alone three-part sale which launches with an Evening Sale on Wednesday 15 th June 2011. This
heaven-like state of all-embracing love as the two
central figures, a husband and wife enclosed
within their garden walls with a number of dogs(emblematic in Spencer’s work of the kind of
untrammelled freedom mankind is seeking),
enjoy a mystical state of joy, embracing and
being embraced by huge sunflowers. Spencer’s
more complex, narrative works such as this were
less readily appreciated by the wider collecting community of the time, yet Evill belonged to a small
band of collectors who saw in works such as these the “real Spencer”. Sir Hugh Walpole was another
collector who shared Evill’s appreciation of Spencer’s work and he was quick to recognise the
importance of this painting, purchasing it within just two hours of its exhibition in December 1937.
Disappointed at having missed it, Evill was able to buy it from Walpole some seven years later for£100. It is now estimated at £1,000,000-1,500,000.
***See Editor’s Notes for further information on Stanley Spencer***
Further Highlights of the Sale
Beyond the uniquely large group of works by Spencer, the sale offers paintings, drawings,
watercolours and sculptures; a selection which moves through generational boundaries, and
highlights different phases of Evill’s collecting. Starting with the major names of the inter-war period,
such as Henry Moore, Edward Burra, and Graham Sutherland, together with Spencer, WilliamRoberts and Paul Nash, his involvement with the Contemporary Art Society gave him access to a
younger generation of artists working in the post-war period. These included the young Lucian Freud,
John Craxton and Patrick Heron.
A stunning example of Lucian Freud’s early work Boy on a Sofa
(pictured right, est. £400,000-600,000), drawn in 1944,
demonstrates the artist’s exceptional ability as a draughtsman. A
composition of wonderful simplicity, the direct presentation of
the sitter (Billy Lumley) and his engagement with us as a viewer
is nevertheless somewhat disarming, and the setting – using theworn chaise that appears in the seminal The Painter’s Room of the
same year – and the clothing appear oddly out of keeping with
the youth and innocence of the sitter.
Its companion, Boat on a Beach (pictured right, est. £400,000-
600,000), has only ever been exhibited once in public (at Evill’s
Memorial Exhibition in 1965). It records a trip that Freud made
to the Scilly Isles in 1945, and the sparse simplicity of thesubject combines with the vivid blue of the sea to create an
* The new auction record for Stanley Spencer was set at Sotheby’s in December 2010 for Hilda and I at
Pond Street which sold for £1,430,050
**Estimates do not include buyer’s premium
Stanely Spencer R.A.
From 1908 to 1912, Spencer studied at the Slade School of Art at University College, London under
Henry Tonks and others. His contemporaries at the Slade included Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler,
Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg. Spencer was born and spent
much of his life in Cookham in Berkshire, and so profound was his attachment to the village of his
birth that most days he would take the train back home in time for tea. The village even became his
nickname: his fellow student C.R.W. Nevinson dubbed him Cookham, a name which Spencer himself
took to using for a time, and indeed one work in the Evill/Frost Collection is signed ‘Stanley Cookham
Spencer’. As appreciation for his work grew, he won several prizes and was included in Roger Fry'simportant Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1912, and later he was awarded a CBE, was
knighted and was elected to the Royal Academy.
Works from the Evill/Frost Collection will be exhibited abroad in the following locations:
Hong Kong from 1-7th April 2011
San Francisco from 13-14th April 2011
Chicago, from 19- 20th April
New York, from 29th April – 3rd May 2011Moscow from 19-20th May 2011