Lord Attenborough's £100,000 profit from Nude portrait of Bristol businessman's daughter
Lord Attenborough is set to reap the benefits of the investment he made in 1986 when he bought the picture, Nude, by artist William Scott for £10,000. Under auction at Sotheby's, in London on November 11, it is expected to fetch as much as £150,000.
The painting features Scott's wife Mary whose father William Lucas owned paint manufacturing company, Colthurst & Harding now run as The Paintworks.
Hilda Mary Lucas, known as Mary, was born in 1912 in Clifton. Her father was from an old Bristol Family, he was a Freeman of the city and his family were in shipping. Her mother had studied painting in Paris and then lived at The Manor House, Chew Magna.
Mary studied at the Bristol School of Art, and then at the Slade, in London before being admitted to the sculpture department of the Royal Academy Schools in London in June 1934. It was at the RA Schools that she met William Scott, whom she married in May 1937.
Although the Scotts travelled extensively, and always had a London base, much of their married life was spent in and around Bristol. Shortly after the birth of their first son, Robert, in 1940, William and Mary moved from Dublin, where they had been since September 1939, to Bristol where they stayed with Mary's mother at Miles Road, Clifton.
The auction guide at Sotheby's describes the painting as belonging; "to a rare and early group of works depicting the artist's wife, Mary, which were painted in the years before and immediately after World War II."
Scott, born in Greenock, Scotland, but raised in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, was the third of eleven children of a signwriter and house painter.
His importance as an artist was officially confirmed on May 9,1984,when he was elected to the Royal Academy, which entitled him to place the letters RA after his name. Since the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, there have been only about six hundred Royal Academicians and they include Turner, Constable and Reynolds.
Since his death, at the age of 76, on December 28, 1989, the value of his work has soared. Last year, at Christie's in London, his picture, Bowl, Eggs and Lemons, sold for £1,071,650, and set a new world auction record for a work by the artist.
His 1946 picture, Nude, is among the fifty one paintings that Lord Attenborough, 86, is selling and which are set to fetch between £2 million and £3 million.
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