Bonham’s is holding a sale of art works by John Campbell Mitchell with 52 pieces valued at £30,000. Mitchell’s artwork has hung in his Scottish home since his death in 1922, according to the BBC.
He built a collection of works by his friends and contemporaries such as Charles Mackie, Robert Noble and artist Robert Burns, whose work also feature in the sale. Chris Brickley, head of pictures for Bonhams Scotland, said: “Mitchell is one of Scotland’s more original landscape painters, exhibiting prolifically from 1886 until his death in 1922. “He is a classic example of a British Impressionism artist working en plein air to produce light, atmospheric oils with big skies. His favoured sketching grounds included his home turf of the Argyll coast, Dumfriesshire and Moray.”
Despite that build-up, Scottish painting just hasn’t been holding up on the market recently. Sotheby’s held a Scottish sale in London last week that made only £1.483m with some of the top lots failing and others selling at the low end of the estimate range.
Sale of Art ‘Untouched’ from 1922 (BBC News)