But when three works by leading names in this market appeared at a recent sale at Lacy Scott & Knight (22.5% buyer’s premium), the Suffolk saleroom duly experienced strong interest from the Philippines.
Consigned by a London-based client, the pictures had been acquired around 50 years ago by the vendor’s father who had spent a lot of time travelling around Asia.
Two of the works were by Fernando Zóbel (1924-84), a Spanish-Filipino artist who studied in the US and was heavily inf luenced by the abstract expressionism of Mark Rothko. A prolific painter, his reputation and auction prices have grown considerably since his death. While he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Merit in his homeland in 2006, he is now one of most prominent names in the market for Philippine art with his works having routinely fetched six-figure sums for over a decade.
Por la carretera general de Valencia… by Fernando Zóbel, £165,000 at Lacy Scott & Knight.
A landmark retrospective at the Prado in Madrid held in 2022-23 raised interest further.
While Zóbel paintings have appeared numerous times at auction in the Philippines and Spain (with a handful also selling elsewhere in Europe and the US), the works at LSK were seemingly the first at a UK provincial saleroom.
They dated from the mid-to-late 1960s – a desirable period for an artist whose style was constantly evolving. The most sought after on account of its larger size, attractive subject and striking tones was a 3ft 4in (1.02m) square oil on canvas where the artist attempted to convey the effect of bonfires at dusk.
The signed picture carried an inscription with its lengthy title: Por la carretera general de Valencia, pasado Perales de Tajuña – pequeñas hogueras, Novembre de 1966 (Along the main road of Valencia, past pear trees of Tajuña – small bonfires, November 1966). With the estimate set at £30,000-50,000, it drew a strong bidding battle and was eventually knocked down at £165,000 to a Filipino gallery bidding online.
The price was a house record for a painting at LSK and the second-highest price at the firm for a work in any category, only behind the pair of Sèvres swan-neck vases that famously made £500,000 in March 1999, setting a record for any lot in a regional saleroom at the time.
The other Zóbel painting at the current sale was La Puerta Estrecha (the narrow door), a 2ft 9in (83cm) square oil on canvas from 1969. Here again a good competition emerged and the lot surpassed a £20,000- 30,000 estimate, selling to the same buyer at £74,000.
The third work from the same source was an acrylic, pencil and ink on paper laid on compressed card by Benedicto Reyes Cabrera (b.1942), another pre-eminent Filipino painter who is known as ‘BenCab’.
Depicting a pair of figures, it was signed and dated ‘74 in pencil to the lower right.
Here the estimate was set at £10,000-15,000 and the lot was eventually knocked down at £30,000 to a different gallery in the Philippines bidding over the phone.
