An Angusauction house will be taking a leap in the dark tomorrow when it seeks buyers for works by an enigmatic and near-forgotten Scottish artist.
Only a small collection of paintings and a cardboard box of personal belongings remain of the life of Frances Watt, whose work hung in galleries and private collections across the globe as recently as the early 1980s.
After spending 30 years in storage in Aberdeen, some of her painting and sketches will be sold at Taylor’s Auction Rooms in Montrose.
However, sale room manager Jonathan Taylor has said he has no idea what prices they will fetch. He explained that searches on a website which gathers sales data from auction houses across the world turned up no information on Watt.
“It’s like she never existed,” he said.
The lots, which have no reserve price and will go to the highest bidder, include a series of oil paintings and sketches commissioned by the Council of the Stock Exchange to record the daily life in the Square Mile.
Mr Taylor said: “The City paintings she did were very highly thought of at the time but because of how art moves, the style fell out of favour.
“The paintings were featured in a set of postcards in the 1960s. Some of them are very stylish they have a sort of Mad Men 1950s and 1960s feel that’s quite popular at the moment.
“It could be an interesting sale to see.”
Watt was born in Falkirk in 1923 and attended schools in Geneva and Aberdeen. After attending art colleges including the Byan Shaw School of Drawing and Painting in London, Watt began exhibiting her work in the 1950s.
During the 1960s her paintings and illustrations of the “old” Stock Exchange were included in the Stock Exchange Journal, the Times newspaper and the Lord Mayor’s Art Awards exhibition.
Other works represented in the Taylor’s collection include landscapes of her native Scotland and religious subjects, a radical stylistic departure from the London paintings.
“These include paintings of Jesus accompanied by a black collie.
Mr Taylor added: “In the past 30 years Watt has become one of Scotland’s forgotten artists but her work, which captures a style and period that is shrugging off its unfashionable tag, will soon be on public display again.”