Evill Frost Press Release 7.3.11

8/7/2019 Evill Frost Press Release 7.3.11

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For Immediate ReleasePress Release London

London | +44 (0)20 7293 6000 | Mitzi Mina | [email protected]@[email protected]@sothebys.com Sarah Rustin | [email protected]@[email protected]@sothebys.comomomom

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



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incomparable collection comprises outstanding works of the highest calibre by Modern British

masters including the most important – and largest – group of paintings by Stanley Spencer ever to

come to the market, in addition to works by Lucian Freud, Henry Moore, Dame Barbara Hepworth,

Graham Sutherland, Edward Burra and Patrick Heron, amongst many others. The collection – which

is estimated to fetch in excess of £12 million and comprises not only 20 th-century British art but also

furniture and porcelain – will be sold by the executors of the Honor Frost estate in order to benefit

charitable causes relating to marine archeology.

The paintings and sculptures, collected by Wilfrid Evill between 1925 and 1960 and then vigilantly

maintained by Honor Frost, represent a window for the collectors of today to look into a past world,

and the dispersal of this collection offers those same collectors opportunities that appear perhaps only

once in a lifetime – to acquire the very best. The collection, aside from the Spencers which have been

loaned for Stanley Spencer retrospectives, has been largely hidden from view since the 1965 Wilfrid

Evill Memorial exhibition at Brighton City Art Gallery. The assemblage demonstrates an unparalleled

vision of the achievements and talent of some of the most accomplished British artists in the period

just before and after World War II.

Henry Wyndham, Chairman Sotheby’s Europe, comments: “Rarely does the sale of a collection provoke

such excitement and enthusiasm among the collecting community as that of the Evill/Frost Collection. It is truly

an honour to bring this group of works of such supreme quality and rarity to the market, as well as to continue

our affiliation with Wilfrid Evill, whose property was first sold in our sale rooms as far back as 1963. Sotheby’s

has been at the forefront of evolution of the market for works by masters of 20th-Century British Art. Last

December a new benchmark was set with the record price at auction for a work by Stanley Spencer*,

demonstrating both the strength of the market in this field and a particular appreciation for Spencer, whose

works of great quality are so rarely offered at auction, simply because they are so scarcely available.”

Wilfrid Evill and Honor Frost

A discreet but widely respected connoisseur, Wilfrid Evill was a collector with a remarkable

understanding of contemporary art during the inter-war period and just after. His interest in and

support for British artists at this time ensured the careers of some of our most celebrated artists. Evill’s

choices when he held a ten-year tenure as a buyer for the Contemporary Arts Society ensured the

acquisition of masterpieces for museums and galleries throughout Britain.

Wilfrid Evill was a London solicitor who represented several artists including Stanley Spencer, Lucian

Freud and Graham Sutherland – along with a number of other notable

names such as Evelyn Waugh – but he also represented trade unions.It was with Stanley Spencer that Evill struck up a particularly strong

friendship and he eventually built up the most important private

collection of Spencer’s work. Evill’s appreciation of and support for

Spencer’s work led him to acquire paintings directly after their

exhibition, but he also pursued works that had been bought by other

collectors, waiting a number of years until they appeared for sale on

the market. Notable too are the large sums he paid for works he

desired. In 1937 he paid £250 to secure Workmen in the House – a

considerable amount to be spent on art at the time and significantly

more money than he spent for on any other work in his collection forsome years. For Lucian Freud’s Boy on a Sofa, for example, he paid just



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while collectors and connoisseurs have known of its existence, few have had access for at least a

generation – a cause, on occasion, of public lament (the catalogue to Tate’s Stanley Spencer exhibition

of 2001/2, describes the unavailability of Evill’s Sunflower and Dog Worship as something “to be most

regretted”).

Stanley Spencer, R.A. (1891-1959)

The elements of narrative, personal experience and

visionary presentation make Stanley Spencer one of

the most important yet elusive British artists of the

twentieth century, and he is represented in the

Evill/Frost Collection by a group of works that offer

an opportunity to rediscover and re-engage with the

artist’s life and vision. Executed in 1935, Workmen in

the House (pictured right, est. £1.5-2.5 million**) ranks

among the most important works in StanleySpencer’s oeuvre. It has featured in virtually every

publication on the artist, and indeed was chosen as

the cover for the important 1955 Tate retrospective of

the artist’s work, as well as for Evill’s memorial

exhibition in 1965. It thus holds a position as one of

the best-known yet relatively little seen of Spencer’s

major paintings. One of his more accessible works of

this period in Spencer’s career, Workmen in the House

refers to an incident at Chapel View, the house

Spencer lived in whilst painting the BurghclereChapel series. The everyday setting of a smoking kitchen range becomes a springboard for the artist

which allows him to address a much wider range of topics, not least the element of intrusion and

disturbance of the home environment that the visit of the workmen entails. As with much of Spencer’s

best work, one detailed memory leads to a wider remembrance, and in a letter of 1937 he outlined

how this derived from the sense of excitement that he had experienced as a small boy when familiar

rooms were redecorated and the furniture moved around.

A superb example of Spencer’s vision and artistic ability right up to the

end of his life is The Bathing Pool, Dogs, painted in 1957 (pictured left,

est. £800,000-1.2 million). Set at the Odney Club in Cookham, thepanoply of dogs of all types works wonderfully as a foil to the

somewhat vain posing of the young girls promenading with them by

the river. The artist’s rendering of the animals and his exalting of their

unrestrained natures gives the painting a sense of both riot and joy. In

contrast, the girls’ poses and presentation seems intentionally

contrived and artificial. The tension in the leads wrapped around the

hand of the main figure helps to add to the dynamic interplay of forms

across the composition, but overriding the whole painting is the sense

of sheer doggy-ness.



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Spencer’s Sunflower and Dog Worship, an

important work of 1937, ranks among the most

extreme manifestations of Spencer’s notion of

universal harmony. In it, Spencer envisages a

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



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image imbued with the sense of a space only recently vacated. The idyllic quality of the scene is oddly

prophetic of the visit Freud was to make to Greece the following year with John Craxton, where the

vivid colours and the keen light were to be deeply influential.

Graham Sutherland’s highly important work The Crucifixion

(pictured right, est: £200,000-300,000) relates to a commission for St.

Matthew's Church, Northampton, when Henry Moorerecommended him, on the basis of Sutherland being able to work

within the parameters of a church commission whilst achieving the

highest standards of achievement. The theme may be entwined with

Sutherland's friendship and working relationship with Francis

Bacon during this period. Sutherland's prominence and reputation

at this time was far ahead of that of Bacon, and recent study has

explored characteristics of their dialogue of influences.

Not seen in public since the Wilfrid Evill Memorial

Exhibition of 1965, Patrick Heron’s Table with Fishes, of

1954, is estimated at £250,000-350,000. This is a superb

example of Heron’s early style, drawing on the example

of Braque’s magisterial Atelier interiors, but employing a

palette and manner entirely his own. The colouring of

this painting is particularly striking, the blue, red and

pink creating the space of the room, whilst the dense inkyblackness of the night-time world beyond the window is

remarkable. The thick handling of the paint offers a

wonderful counterpoint to the delicacy of Heron’s line,

which winds beautifully across the image, giving enough

detail to inform without ever showing too much. The guttering flame of the candle is a master-stroke,

animating the entire composition with just the simplest and most minimal gesture.

Henry Moore’s bronze, Rocking Chair No.3 was purchased by Evill

in the 1950s for £150. One of an edition of 6 casts, this importantpiece now comes to auction with an estimate of £800,000-1,200,000.

Moore’s ability to combine realism and abstraction in his sculpture

works here as a perfect vehicle for a sculpture that despite its scale

has both a monumentality and a real tenderness. The theme of the

mother and child was a central one for Moore throughout his

career and this marvellously poised sculpture captivates by its

understanding of the subject and his rendering of it into sculptural

forms.



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A rigorously urban image of life on the streets, rife with style and

shrewdly observed elements of character, Edward Burra’s Zoot Suits,

£250,000-350,000, depicts a group of men newly arrived in London

from Jamaica on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948, and who are

establishing themselves within the new urban culture that wasburgeoning in London. The work recalls Burra’s excitement on first

visiting New York in 1933 when he was particularly drawn to the

energy of the Harlem Renaissance and therefore draws a parallel

between the artistic and social movements present in New York in

the 1930s and those emerging in London in the 1940s.

Furniture & Ceramics

In addition to works of art, the sale will also include a selection of furniture and ceramics, a highlight

of which is a Sèvres tea service contained within a kingwood parquetry carrying box (est. £10,000-

15,000), formerly in the collection of the great actor, director and theatre manager David Garrick

(1717-79). Garrick visited Paris three times and on his final visit in the autumn of 1764, returning from

a European tour, he purchased this Sèvres service together with its fitted box. This illustrious owner

and the high quality of the set by possibly the best 18th

century porcelain manufactures would havedelighted Evill and met the qualifying requirements of beauty and quality that were established for

choosing objects for his collection.

The inter- and post-war period, during which Wilfrid Evill formed his

collection of Regency furniture, was a period where the main collecting

tastes in the field of English furniture focused on the 17th and 18th centuries.

That Evill focused his attention on seeking out some of the finest and most

unusual pieces of early 19th-century furniture is testament to his advanced

taste and certainly mirrors his approach to picture collecting. He sought

the finest examples as collector’s pieces to be admired rather than used.While Honor Frost shared a deep appreciation of his collection of

furniture, when she moved into the flat on Welbeck Street that was

formerly Evill’s office and housed the collection, she adopted the pieces

into everyday life. An extraordinary chair that was, for Evill, a treasured

object, was for Honor a much-loved desk chair in which she would apply

herself to marine archeological research. This Important Regency

simulated rosewood and parcel-gilt ‘Klismos’ type armchair, circa 1815, in the manner of Thomas

Hope (pictured right) will be offered with an estimate of £10,000-15,000 and wonderfully illustrates

the eclectic nature and high quality of the Decorative Art objects from the collection.



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Notes to editors

* 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

London from 9-14th June 2011

Sale dates at Sotheby’s New Bond Street, London:

Evening Sale Part I: 15th June 2011

Day Sale Parts II & III: Thursday 16th June 2011

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Evill Frost Press Release 7.3.11

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