English Garden (1965), the first English landscape David Hockney ever painted, is headed for auction. The work will be included in Sotheby’s modern and contemporary evening auction in London on March 4th. It is estimated to fetch between £2.5 million and £3.5 million ($3.38 million–$4.73 million). Ahead of the sale, the work will be on display for the first time in three decades in Sotheby’s London galleries. English Garden marks a pivotal moment in Hockney’s career; rigorous explorations of natural scenes came to define his work. The artist painted the tableau from memory while living in Boulder, Colorado. “English Garden was also painted in Boulder from a photograph of topiary work in England that I found in American Vogue,” the artist wrote in his 1988 book, David Hockney by David Hockney. “As it was painted at the same time as Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians (1965), some students thought it was a picture of Indians squatting on a lawn.” It was painted at a time when abstract art dominated the market, and Hockney’s portrayal added new depth to the landscape genre. The last time the work was publicly seen was in 1997, when it was sold at a previous Sotheby’s auction and entered a private collection.
Other sale highlights include a series of works by School of London artists, ranging from a 1972 self-portrait painted by Francis Bacon following a personal tragedy (estimated £8 million–£12 million; $10.8 million–$16.2 million) to a pair of career-defining portraits, A Young Painter (1958) (estimated £4 million–£6 million; $5.41 million–$8.11 million) and Blond Girl on a Bed (1987) (estimated £6 million–£8 million; $8.11 million–$10.8 million) by Lucian Freud. Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool (1971) (estimated £600,000–£800,000; $811,000–$1.08 million), which is considered to be the British figurative painter’s masterpiece, is also on offer.
Meanwhile, a suite of Impressionist and Modernist works by Claude Monet, Paul Signac, Fernand Léger, and Edgar Degas are also for sale, their estimates ranging from £2.5 million–£3.5 million ($3.38 million–$4.73 million) for Degas’s Scène de ballet (c. 1885) to £6.5 million–£8.5 million ($8.79 million–$11.49 million) for Monet’s 1884 oil on canvas Maison de jardinier, which he painted while in Italy.
Other works by major British painters round out the sale. They include a monumental sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, a large-scale example of Briget Riley’s curve paintings, and Glenn Brown’s only self-portrait.
