If any collectors are feeling gorged after next week’s big New York auctions of Modern and contemporary art, which run 8 May through 12 May, Sotheby’s will offer two works at its American Art sale on 18 May that may serve as a compelling digestif.
The sale of 65 works will be lead by a large painting by John Singer Sargent and a detail-packed one by Norman Rockwell, both estimated to sell for $4m to $6m, which is impressive in this market. (Last year’s sale was led by Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1927 White Calla Lily, which hammered just below its low estimate at $7.8m, or $8.99m with buyer’s premium.)
Sargent’s Poppies (1885-86), pops with lush English flora and is a study created at the same time he was working on Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-86), which has been in the collection of the Tate since 1887 and was part of the Royal Academy's recent exhibition Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse. Sargent made the works in the Cotswolds, having fled the US after the scandal caused by his racy—for the time—portrait Madame X. If the painting achieves its estimate, it would likely be in the top ten prices for Sargent’s work bought at auction.
Rockwell has had a bit of a moment in the auction world lately: his Saying Grace (1951) set a $46.1m record for the artist at Sotheby’s New York in 2013, and five of his top ten lots were sold in the last five years. Road Block (1949), the work on offer on 18 May, is a complicated Saturday Evening Post cover that features a scene of a very American alleyway joining forces to coax a puppy out of the way of a delivery truck. According to the book Rockwell on Rockwell, the artist said of the piece: “There are about 25 figures in this one, not counting the pigeons. My only excuse is that I wanted to paint this subject and I started to do the job with only ten people in it. Then, like Topsy, it ‘just growed’.’”