The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Road House sold for more than £250,000
A PA INTING of a house by Scotland’s most successful living artist fetched more than £250,000 at auction yesterday.
The seminal work, Road House, was painted by Edinburgh-born Peter Doig, the 51-year-old who is now one of the world’s most sought after artists.
The atmospheric oil painting, completed in 1989, shows an isolated house with blacked-out windows and silvery birches on either side.
The work, which had never been sold before, was sold at Bonhams’ auction of 20th century British and Irish art on New Bond Street for £265,250.
Doig gave the distinctive painting to the late husband of the seller, and it had been in private ownership since.
Matthew Bradbury, Bonhams’ head of 20th century British and Irish art, said the sale had been “a rare opportunity” to acquire such a formative example of Doig’s work.
Road House, painted at such a crucial time in Doig’s development, should be viewed as an important canvas within his oeuvre, building on the past and heralding the future.
Doig’s f irst break came in 1993 when his painting Blotter won the John Moores Prize.
He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994.
In 2007, his 1990 painting White Canoe sold at Sotheby’s for £ 5.7 million, then an auction record for a living European artist.
In 2008, a retrospective of his work entitled Peter Doig was held at Tate Britain, the Paris Museum of Modern A rt and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt.