Liss Llewellyn Fine Art Sale January 2016

UPDATE: Monday 18 Jan 2016

Other artwork added to the sale and also this blog entry!

PRICES REDUCED!

Bag yourself a bargain in 2016!

The great flight
Lilliput Jan-Feb 1952, Vol. 30(1), issue #176
"The great flight" by 'BB', pp.72-74
 £975  £675

I am almost at the point of being able to get my computer and Raymond Sheppard resources up and running again. Re-plastering a house is a very tiresome thing and if you ever need anyone to persuade you to move out while it's done, contact me!

Paul Liss and Sacha Llewellyn has announced their new year sale and this one contains 27 pieces by Raymond Sheppard. Starting prices begin at £200 and go all the way up to £1,860

I've grouped them together under themes to show them slightly differently than they are presented on the Liss Llewellyn Fine Art page. Click the link under each picture to be taken to the complete description on LLFA. I'm sure I shall get round to writing more about each of the magazine articles below at some point. Watch this space!

MAGAZINES

Operation Jericho
Lilliput October 1957 Vol. 41(4), issue # 244
by Sandy Sanderson, pp.22
£450  £290

"Q-ships were expendable" by John Prebble
Lilliput September 1957 Vol. 41(3), issue # 243 pp.22-28
£360  £250

H.M.S. Goliath and The end of the Konigsberg
Lilliput November 1957 Vol. 41(5), issue # 245
"End of a sea raider" by Alan Scholfield, pp.20-27
£370  £200

"a ship sunk to block the channel" "The Henry-Farman plane"
Lilliput November 1957 Vol. 41(5), issue # 245
"End of a sea raider" by Alan Scholfield, pp.20-27
£400  £180

"North Sea incident" title page
Lilliput June 1957 Vol. 40(6), issue #240
"North Sea incident" by John Curtis pp.52-58
£780  £495

"The adventures of Rene Cutforth" title page
Lilliput January 1956 Vol. 38(1), issue #223
"The adventures of Rene Cutforth" pp31-33
£975

Leave it to Jones
Young Elizabethan January 1956 Vol.9(1)
"Leave it to Jones" by John Kippax p.21
£1380  £1,000

 ANIMAL SKETCHES

Serval by Raymond Sheppard
£975  £900 

Study of a tiger by Raymond Sheppard
£1320  £990

Study of a tiger by Raymond Sheppard
£1680  £1,260

Polar bear (glancing right) by Raymond Sheppard
£780  £590

Polar bear (glancing right) by Raymond Sheppard
£660  £500

Study of Cockerels by Raymond Sheppard
£1080  £575

Studies of an Impala  by Raymond Sheppard
£1140

Studies of an Impala  by Raymond Sheppard
£1500  £1,200

The following is a beautiful picture of a stag. Sheppard's use of colour is superb, showing depth of perspective, and use of white paper to allow the sun to shine through.

Monarch of the Glen  c. 1935 by Raymond Sheppard
£1140  £860

FAMILY SKETCHES

I really love the child studies and portraits that Sheppard did of his two children Christine and Michael. The one showing Christine drawing at the table is so evocative. Anyone who has had children will have spotted just such a moment.

Self Portrait with the artist's daughter Christine, c.1950
  by Raymond Sheppard
£570  £325 

Two portraits of Christine c.1951
  by Raymond Sheppard
£780  £590

Christine Sketching at the Kitchen, at 25 Dorchester Way, circa 1952
  by Raymond Sheppard
£1860

Micheal with toy car, circa 1952 by Raymond Sheppard
£1440  £775

Christine imploring by Raymond Sheppard
£200  £95

The artist's wife Iris listening to the wireless by Raymond Sheppard
£980  £575

PLACES

Chipperfield Common Herts, circa 1950 by Raymond Sheppard
£900  £400

Chicken roosts, c.1940 by Raymond Sheppard
£590  £410

Groynes and Shoreline by Raymond Sheppard
£290 SOLD

Beach scene (1930s?)
£630  £500

I'd love to know if anyone knows where this is.

OBJECTS

Still life of Pueblo Navajo and Apache ceramics, late 1930's
by Raymond Sheppard
£470  £300

Ivory Coast masks from the Natural History Museum 1950's (S|R 58)
by Raymond Sheppard
£410 SOLD

The following ink and watercolour sketch is interesting in the light of Sheppard's extensive illustrations for M.D. Hillyard's Caravan Family series which I'll write about another day.

Caravan in the Woods, dated March 4th 1950 by Raymond Sheppard
£950  £760

And finally, Sheppard produced a few abstract pictures. One wonders if the cancer treatment at the end of his life produced these strange dreamscapes. Liss-Llewellyn have called this "Sea Forms"

Sea Forms, c.1950
£1950  £975

All images copyright © 2015 Liss Llewellyn Fine Art and used with kind permission

Raymond Sheppard and wooden buildings

Windmills in Norfolk (Raymond Sheppard)

On our journey, outlined in the previous three blog posts, we wondered whether it would possible to identify the building drawn below

"Old wooden building in the woods"

Stop for a moment and look at it and say what you think it might be. Firstly it is in woods, secondly there are people walking by and on a path that's well-trodden, with a sign on the ground. The building itself appears like a tiled barn on the left and has a tower. The tower appears shingled, or possibly lead-lined. and there are only two 'windows' visible due to the wisteria or ivy growth. The tower looks to be hexagonal and the connecting part has a doorway.

What sort of building would have a tower/turret with window slots? And where could it be? I decided to firstly look at Google Maps for woods in the same area as the round churches, and there was Waveney Forest at St. Olaves. I was drawn to the space in the woods that had a track leading to it and imagine my surprise when I see that it's a round tower of some sort.

On our holiday we walked into the woods on a public way and found a residence called "The Round House". The viewpoint and location were so similar, as the picture above, that we felt it could be a new building on that site, matching the contours but built in brick. (For privacy reasons I am not published a photo I took). I also found this on the Norfolk heritage site, as I trawled the Internet. If anyone knows any more I'd be grateful to hear from them. Please email me here - You'll need to type the address in your email:

Lastly on our walk to this spot we passed a very interesting windmill.

River Waveney and St. Olave's Mill

St. Olave's Mill

St. Olave's Mill

St. Olave's Mill

The River Waveney is part of the Norfolk Broads and the mill sits alongside. Interestingly Christine Sheppard shared some of her father's sketches of 'draining mills' in the Norfolk area and it appears this is one.

Drainage Mill

Draining Mill at Herringfleet

Draining Mill at Herringfleet

Draining Mill on the marshes

The BBC tells me that these are "smock mills" introduced by the Dutch and contrary to opinion did not grind flour but were for drainage of the rivers.

That's the end of our Norfolk Broads Round Tower Church Adventure.

Raymond Sheppard and Round Tower Churches - Burgh Castle Church

Norfolk has 123 standing round tower churches (most in the South east of the county), Suffolk 38, Essex 6, Cambridge 2, Sussex 3, and Berkshire 2. Kent, Surrey and Orkney have one each which have either disappeared or are in a ruinous state. So "it is clear that the greatest concentration of round-towered churches is in the south east Norfolk" and the north east corner of Suffolk (Ashwin, 2005). Heywood, the author of the chapter on round-towered churches, goes on to explain "this convergence towards the valleys of the Rivers Yare and Waveney simply reflects a greater population of the area during the early Middle Ages (p.60). If you want to know more consult the many sources on the Internet (or books - love a library!) mentioned below.

Burgh Castle Church by Raymond Sheppard

Christine  Sheppard, in kindly sharing the paintings and drawings that her father did of round tower churches, presented me with a mystery, and she should know me better than to think I'd not give it a go!

Taken from as near as I could (my wife holds the reproduction we took with us)

I'm falling in love with flint!

St Peter and St Paul Burgh Castle was not difficult to find. As two drawings were in this area it seemed likely the mystery "East Anglian" church - as it had been labelled - was here nearby. The tower here is 50 feet and inside the church appears flat walled and the thickness of the church's walls are an apparent sign that the church was here before the tower. The nearby Roman fort is likely to have been plundered for stone to build the church. This tower is battlemented and dressed with flint as are others.

In taking the photo to emulate Sheppard's angle you'll notice that the two gravestones are now, if they weren't then, propped up and several other stones nearer the porch have now gone. If you look closely you'll see that a gravestone (see below) has now had a substantial tree grow up in front of it to block Sheppard's view if he were drawing this today!

Trees grow where they will!

Lastly we will look at a mysterious wooden building and a mill in the next episode of our journey in Norfolk and Suffolk!

SOURCES

1. Heywood, Stephen, Round-Towered Churches, pp.29-30 in Ashwin, Trevor and Alan Davison (eds.)(2005), An historical atlas of Norfolk. Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd.  [ISBN: 1860773494])
2. Goode, W. J.  1994, Round tower churches of South East England  Round Tower Church Society  [ISBN: 0952305801] 

Raymond Sheppard and Round Tower Churches - Herringfleet St. Margaret's

Herringfleet Church

Norman's attempt to copy Sheppard!

The second church I want to focus on in our tour of the Norfolk-Suffolk border is Herringfleet St Margaret's. It was hard to find as no signposts wanted to help us and our satnav was confused at this point. But determination paid off.

The church's tower is 47 feet high and as you can see from my photos below, is circular to the parapet and has no battlements or stair turret. Apparently the way the flint is laid in the tower helps date the church tower to the late Saxon period.  I read that the bells in the tower are dated 1611 and 1837. The unusual aspect - found in a few Norfolk/Suffolk churches - is that the roof and chancel are thatched and unfortunately I arrived on a day when some blue plastic was placed in the thatch!

Herringfleet Church form the west

Taken to show some the gravestones Sheppard included

...and again a major stone featured in Sheppard's illustration

For the third part of our journey we visit two mystery drawings and hopefully solve them!