Classic schools of Scottish painting in line to benefit from flight to quality

Sotheby's unveiled the major works featured in their first Scottish art sale of the year, with Colourist paintings being the main attraction. One work by SJ Peploe is predicted to fetch up to 500,000.

The first images also emerged of a leading private gallery's offering of works by the Glasgow Boys, timed to coincide with the Kelvingrove Gallery's milestone exhibition which opens this month.

The Goose Girls, by Glasgow Boys painter Sir John Lavery, is on offer at 420,000, the top priced painting in the show at Edinburgh's Bourne Fine Art.

The art market faltered badly as collectors felt the bite of the credit crunch, but last month an Alberto Giacometti sculpture sold for 65 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a single artwork.

Bullish dealers have talked up a turn-around since last autumn when blue-chip works once again began selling for astronomical prices, prompted by uncertainty in the financial markets.

"There are people who want to put their money into art, because it's doing very little in a bank," said Michael Grist, Sotheby's specialist in Scottish pictures.

Sotheby's expects its sale of Scottish pictures to bring in more than 2.3 million. Peploe's striking Tulips, from 1912, valued at 300,000-500,000, goes on show with the other works in Edinburgh before heading to London for the 22 April auction.

Two pictures in the Sotheby's sale are Colourist works that have been passed down through several generations and are only now going on sale.

FCB Cadell's bright and breezy Florian Caf, Venice, estimated to fetch 100,000-150,000, is being sold by the great-grandson of one of the painter's leading patrons.

George Leslie Hunter's work Chrysanthemums, estimated at 200,000-300,000, is another family heirloom.

The Colourists have been a staple of Scottish art sales in recent decades.

This month, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum opens Pioneering Painters, with world-wide loans in what organisers claim is the most important art exhibition there in half a century.

The linked Bourne Fine Art show, which will also tour to London, ranges from work like The Shepherd by Edward Arthur Walton, valued at 95,000, to Lavery's Mrs McEwen of Marchmont and Bardrochat with her daughters, Katharine and Elizabeth, valued at 380,000.

"There's still a distinction between very good and mediocre, and mediocre is not selling," said Emily Walsh, of Bourne Fine Art.

"The market is still volatile, but it is definitely better."

TOP PRICES

THE world auction record for Sir John Lavery – an Irish painter who trained in Glasgow and was counted a leading member of the Glasgow Boys – is thought to be the 1,321,500 paid in 1998 for his 1883 masterpiece The Bridge at Grez.

Samuel John Peploe's oil work Roses, from 1922, was sold for 529,250 at Christie's in Edinburgh in 2008, a record for the artist.