A still-life by Dora Carrington (1893-1932) starred in Mallams’ (20% buyer’s premium) Design & Modern British & Post-War Art sale, selling just shy of the artist’s record.
Included in the May 26 sale at Mallams’ Oxford saleroom, Flowering Cactus nearly trebled its top guide to a trade buyer for £72,000 (see ATG No 2295, News). The current record, according to the Art Sales Index, is the £75,000 hammer paid at Sotheby’s London in 2005 for a melancholic portrait painted in 1920 of the Canadian poet Frank Prewett.
At Mallams, the 2ft 5in x 18in (75 x 45cm) oil on canvas was painted in c.1931, a year before Carrington committed suicide, and had previously been owned by James Strachey, the brother of writer and founding Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey, with whom Carrington had a long and complex relationship.