Suddenly, the world wants Spowers

A DEAD linocut-maker became the darling of the art market  when 10 of her pictures sold at auction for a total of $250,000.

Chris Deutscher

A LONG-DEAD linocut-maker unexpectedly became the darling of the Australian art market in the second half of the year when 10 of her pictures sold at auction for a total of $250,000.

That annual total is the biggest ever recorded for works by Ethel Spowers, for whom only one or two works a year tend to be sold.

Now private collections around the nation are being scoured for prints by Spowers, who died in 1949, as auctioneers spread the word that buyers are willing to pay good prices, especially in Britain

At Sotheby's on November 22, an edition of Spowers's Wet Afternoon sold to a phone buyer for $55,000, three times its low estimate.

A week later at Deutscher and Hackett, another print of the same edition went to a buyer in Britain for $78,000.

A total of 50 prints were made in 1929 of Wet Afternoon, which depicts a flurry of umbrellas under which a small girl can be seen leaning against her mother.

Copies are held at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of NSW, although the picture is not on display at any of those sites.

At a Menzies auction on December 8, four different Spowers images were offered and sold for just under $20,000 each.

The lower prices were due to the lesser quality of those particular images, but each sold above its reserve.

Spowers was born in 1890 into the family that founded Melbourne's Argus newspaper. She travelled to London and studied at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art with Claude Flight.

Auctioneer Chris Deutscher said Spowers was benefiting from a surge in popularity of Flight's work.

"It all depends on images, it's got to be a modernist image," Mr Deutscher said.

The current offering of Spowers pictures in Australia was triggered in May when at Christie's in London a copy of Wet Afternoon sold for $80,000.

Roger Butler, senior curator of Australian prints and drawings at the NGA, said: "As works by Flight become more and more expensive, all the works by his contemporaries are being lifted up."

Spowers is among the more popular of those contemporaries, but works by two other Australian women, Dorritt Black and Evelyn Syme, are also sought-after.

Like Spowers, Syme was the daughter of a significant Melbourne newspaper family, the founders of The Age.