Long-Unseen Leonora Carrington Painting Heads to Heritage Auctions
A small painting by the British-born surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is about to go under the hammer after being out of sight for more than seventy years.
Heritage Auctions, a US auction house, will offer Fil d'Or, a 1953 work, as the lead lot at its Modern & Contemporary Art Signature Auction on 10 November. A lead lot is the item the sale is built around and the one it promotes most. Heritage Auctions describes the painting as newly rediscovered.
The work is modest in size, measuring 13 by 8½ inches (33.0 by 21.6 centimetres). Carrington made it using grattage, a technique in which paint is pressed onto a surface and then peeled away to leave textured, layered forms. It is oil on gessoed canvas, meaning the canvas was first coated with gesso, a chalky primer that gives the paint a smooth base.
Heritage has set an estimate of US$250,000 to US$350,000. An estimate is the auction house's expected price range, not a promise. The final hammer price, the bid the auctioneer closes on before any fees, will not be known until the sale. The buyer's premium, a fee the buyer pays on top of the hammer price, comes on top of that figure.
Patron Magazine reports that the painting has not been seen on the market for more than seven decades. That gap means few people outside the owning family, or whoever held it before, will have had a chance to study it in person.
Carrington spent much of her later life in Mexico, where she died in 2011. Her work moves between painting, writing and fantasy imagery, and her paintings regularly draw bids at auction. This particular canvas, though, has not appeared in public sales in living memory of most collectors.
The sale on 10 November will settle who owns it next. Whoever wins the bidding will also decide whether the painting goes on public view, or stays in a private home.
