George Stubbs’ renowned painting The Spanish Pointer is set to be auctioned for the first time in over 50 years.
As per The Guardian, this 18th-century painting is set to be auctioned at Sotheby’s with an estimated value of £1,500,000-2,000,000.
The painting has been publicly exhibited just once, at the National Gallery of Sports and Pastimes in London in 1948, while the painting’s last public appearance was at Sotheby’s in 1972.
Previously, sold at auction for £30,000 in 1972, it originally fetched £11 at auction in 1802.
Believed to have been painted between 1766 and 1768, The Spanish Pointer is considered as Stubbs’ earliest known painting of a dog.
Julian Gascoigne, a senior director and British paintings specialist at Sotheby’s, remarked that the painting’s condition was still “fantastic” in contrast to many of his artworks which,, according to him, “didn’t last the test of time”.
George Stubbs, born in Liverpool, who died in 1806 at the age of 81, created fewer than 400 paintings in his lifetime. He is most famous for his animal portraits, especially of horses.
Gascoigne added, “It’s exciting for a number of reasons, firstly because it’s a painting that has been lost, if that’s not too dramatic a word, since the 1970s.”
He further shared, “By the sort of middle of his career he was mucking about with people like Josiah Wedgwood and experimenting with enamel and all sorts of things, and mixing wax into his pigments. Whereas this picture is from the first decade of his career, the mid-1760s, when he’s absolutely at the peak of his career.”
The painting will be available for public display at an exhibition of old master and 19th-century paintings for auction at Sotheby’s in west London from November 29 to December 4.
