Catriona Millar

Scottish 20th Century naive oil painting of figures, dogs and birds in interior

Derrick Latimer Sayer (British, 1917 – 1992) Caterpillar Signed, inscribed and dated ‘CATERPILLAR’ (lower left), ‘Derrick Sayer 55’ (lower right) Gouache 7.7/8 x 9.1/4 in. (20 x 23.5 cm.) Derrick Latimer Sayer (1912–1992) has been described as a Neo-Romantic and pop artist, with a career that spanned from the spiritualism of postwar English landscapes, to the bright, optical playfulness of 1960s Pop art. Sayer had a distinguished start to his career, having studied at the Chelsea School of Art in the early 1930s under Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore. In 1936 he founded the Mousehole Group Art School in Cornwall with fellow painters George Lamborn and Guy Allen, and for the next few years he exhibited at a number of small local galleries, while also executing commercial advertising work for major companies such as Shell Oil. The 1940s and 50s were a period of widespread travelling, teaching and experimentation for Sayer, as he founded the Army Art Centre in 1945, worked in the South of France in 1949 and displayed works at the Leicester, Redfern and Winton Galleries across the 1950s. In 1966, he took up the helm as the Head of Art at the Chelsea Westminster Adult Education Institute, a position he held until his retirement in 1982. Ten of Derricks works can be found at the Chelsea Westminster Hospital Arts Project, hung alongside a permanent collection that includes Patrick Heron, Howard Hodgkin, and Sian Tucker. Sayer was known for his studies of female nudes, particularly the examination of the nude in...

Carl Jaycock (British, b. 1963) Sea light Signed and dated ‘C JAYCOCK 85’ (lower right) Oil on board 24 x 24 in. (61 x 61 cm.) Cornwall based Jaycock has...

Scottie Wilson (Scottish, 1888 – 1972, born Louis Freeman) Ducks paradise Signed ‘Scottie’ (lower right), further signed and inscribed with title on th...

This captivating artwork exemplifies the Ewart John's bold and vibrant style, exuding a sense of energy and playfulness. Set against a varied green backdrop, the nudes in the foregro...

"Artist and His Family" is a captivating 1950 oil on board painting by renowned American artist Donna Marecak (1922-1998). This intimate interior scene f...

Signed and dated to the lower right. Presented in a light wooden frame. On canvas laid to board.

Signed lower right, 'Elisabeth' for Elisabeth Gevaert (Belgian, 1934-2016) and dated 1970. A finely-painted, whimsical study of the interior of a milliner's shop with a woman seated...

MADELINE CHRISTINE CLAVIER (1913-2015) Signature: Signed lower right & titled verso Medium: Oil on canvas Provenance: The collection of the artist's family Marie Christine Clavier was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1913 to French parents and lived there for her formative years. She returned to France as a teenager and began to study painting. Her work quickly developed into whimsical paintings of poetry and songs – harmonized in a unique and distinct painting technique. Her work has an impasto feel and a folk art, outsider artist sensibility to it. Similar in style to Maik and other fantasy realists who use animals, flowers and foliage in their artworks. Marie Clavier painted ro herself rather than for profit as she was quite independently wealthy. Her work is in a more whimsical style of Francoise Gilot. She exhibited extensively in the United States in the 1970s especially across Connecticut and New York, showing at various galleries and cultural centres. She had numerous solo exhibitions in the 1970’s- notably at the Maison Francaise in New York and New York University. She showed at Galerie Bernheim Jeune in Paris. She won many awards for her work including Gold Medals and Palme D’Or medals. In 1988 the prestigious art publisher Leopard D’Or produced catalogue book on her life and work – by this point she had virtually given up painting. She died in 2015 aged 102. Bernheim-Jeune gallery is one of the oldest art galleries in Paris. Opened on Rue Laffitte in 1863 by Alexandre Bernheim (1839-1915), friend of Delacroix, Corot and Courbet, it changed location a few times before settling on Avenue Matignon. The gallery promoted realists, Barbizon school paintings and, in 1874, the first impressionist and later post-impressionist painters. It closed in 2019. In 1901, Alexandre Bernheim, with his sons, Josse (1870-1941), and Gaston (1870-1953), organized the first important exhibition of Vincent van Gogh paintings in Paris with the help of art critic Julien Leclercq. In 1906, Bernheim-Jeune frères started presenting works by Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Paul Cezanne, Henri-Edmond Cross, Kees van Dongen, Henri Matisse, Le Douanier Rousseau, Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Amedeo Modigliani, Maurice Utrillo and Georges Dufrenoy. From 1906 to 1925, art critic Félix Fénéon was the director of the gallery and was instrumental in bringing in the art of Georges Seurat and Umberto Boccioni. In 1922, an exhibition brought together works by Alice Halicka, Auguste Herbin, Pierre Hodé, Moise Kisling, Marie Laurencin, Henri Lebasque, Fernand Leger and Henri Matisse. The gallery now exhibits painters and sculptors in the tradition of the École de Paris and artists such as Jean Carzou, Shelomo Selinger or Pollès. Her style is a recognizable, cheerful, whimsical and a happy creation. Naïve art is any form of visual art that is created by a person who lacks the formal education and training that a professional artist undergoes (in anatomy, art history, technique, perspective, ways of seeing). Unlike folk art, naïve art does not necessarily evince a distinct cultural context or tradition. Naïve art is recognized, and often imitated, for its childlike simplicity and frankness. Paintings of this kind typically have a flat rendering style with a rudimentary expression of perspective. One particularly influential painter of "naïve art" was Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), a French Post-Impressionist who was discovered by Pablo Picasso. Naïve art is often seen as outsider art that is by someone without formal (or little) training or degree. While this was true before the twentieth century, there are now academies for naïve art. Naïve art is now a fully recognized art genre, represented in art galleries worldwide. Museums devoted to naïve art now exist in Kecskemét, Hungary; Riga, Latvia; Jaen, Spain; Rio de Janeiro, Brasil; Vicq France and Paris. Another term related to (but not completely synonymous with) naïve art is folk art. There also exist the terms "naïvism" and "primitivism" which are usually applied to professional painters working in the style of naïve art (like Paul Gauguin, Mikhail Larionov, Paul Klee). At all events, naive art can be regarded as having occupied an "official" position in the annals of twentieth-century art since - at the very latest - the publication of the Der Blaue Reiter, an almanac in 1912. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, who brought out the almanac, presented 6 reproductions of paintings by le Douanier' Rousseau (Henri Rousseau), comparing them with other pictorial examples. However, most experts agree that the year that naive art was "discovered" was 1885, when the painter Paul Signac became aware of the talents of Henri Rousseau and set about organizing exhibitions of his work in a number of prestigious galleries. The Earth Group (Grupa Zemlja) were Croatian artists, architects and intellectuals active in Zagreb from 1929 to 1935. The group included the painters Krsto Hegedušić, Edo Kovačević, Omer Mujadžić, Kamilo Ružička, Ivan Tabaković, and Oton Postružnik, the sculptors Antun Augustinčić, Frano Kršinić, and the architect Drago Ibler. A term applied to Yugoslav (Croatian) naive painters working in or around the village of Hlebine, near the Hungarian border, from about 1930. Some of the best known naive artists are Dragan Gaži, Ivan Generalić, Josip Generalić...