A week or two back I mentioned how frequently local items crop up in the most far-flung salerooms. Here’s another – a scene by Newtyle artist William Bradley Lamond consigned to a German saleroom from a collector in the Ruhr region.
Oil on canvas, 18 x 14 inches, but handsomely wider in its good gilt frame, Fisher Village is signed lower left, ‘W. B. Lamond’. Lamond had a studio at Auchmithie, near Arbroath, and, although by no means a regular visitor to this area, I think it might be a view of its shore.
Lamond was born in Newtyle in 1857. His father was an engine driver on the Dundee-Perth line and this took the family to Dundee in 1864. With no formal training, he developed his artistic skills painting portraits, among them the Bard o’ Paton’s Lane, the great William McGonagall.
He soon turned to rural landscapes, and eventually produced fine seascapes in and around Auchmithie. He also joined the turn-of-the-century painterly throng occupying the East Neuk.
When he died in Dundee in 1924, artist friends raised funds for a memorial exhibition, which was opened by Sir Harry Lauder in the McManus Galleries a year later. This featured 50 selling works donated by the likes of Sir William Russell Flint, E. A. Hornel and Robert Gemmell Hutchison and, alongside, over 100 of Lamond’s pictures, loaned by patrons and friends in his adopted city.
Rich in colour, Lamond’s vigorous and powerfully-painted scenes have retained that popularity. I have a neighbour with a dozen!
Fisher Village appears at auction this weekend at the Hargesheimer Kunstauktionen rooms in Düsseldorf, with a reserve of 250 euros.
Fisher Village by W. B. Lamond (Hargesheimer, Düsseldorf).
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