Christie’s has announced another three major works that will be included in its upcoming 250th anniversary Defining British Art sale on June 30 in London. The three paintings by the great modern British painters L.S. Lowry, Sir Stanley Spencer and Francis Bacon will be sold alongside the previously revealed highlights by Lucian Freud, Lord Frederic Leighton, and Sir Joshua Reynolds.Francis Bacon’s landmark oil on canvas painting “Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe” 1968 is being offered with an estimate in the region of £20 million. According to Christie’s, this rare example of a female nude in Bacon’s practice is one of only a few of the artist’s reclining nudes to come to the market in recent years.Sir Stanley Spencer’s “The Garage” 1929, from a series of five pictures commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board on the theme of Industry and Peace, is being offered by the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation with an estimate of £1.5-£2.5 million. The proceeds will be used to further develop the Foudation’s worldwide support of vital projects across arts, culture, and heritage.Laurence Stephen Lowry’s 1951 “Industrial Scene,” being sold from a private collection with an estimate of £1.5-2.5 million, is a highly complex urban panorama filled with figures and houses set against a backdrop of factories billowing smoke from towering chimney stacks. According to Christie’s, it is one of the Lowry’s most compositionally successful and well-balanced industrial scenes.These three works will be on public view in New York (6 to 12 May) and Hong Kong (26 to 30 May) alongside the paintings by Lucian Freud, Lord Leighton, and Sir Joshua Reynolds as part of Christie’s Defining British Art Loan Exhibition, which will present a range of outstanding British artworks that have been handled by Christie’s in the last 250 years.
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