Albert Irvin valuation
Painted London as bands, bars and blazing colour, well into his nineties.
Albert Irvin was born in London in 1922, trained as an RAF navigator during the war, and studied at Goldsmiths, where he later taught for more than twenty years.
What a work by Albert Irvin is worth
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Bio
Albert Irvin was born in London in 1922, trained as an RAF navigator during the war, and studied at Goldsmiths, where he later taught for more than twenty years. From the mid-1960s he worked entirely abstractly, at large scale, in acrylic laid on with broad decorators' brushes: bands, arcs, sweeps and blocks of intense colour on a light ground, deliberately joyful, and titled after London streets, parks and Underground stations. He worked in the same Stepney studio for decades, was elected a Royal Academician, and continued painting almost to his death in 2015 at ninety-two.
The large canvases lead the market, with scale a decisive factor. Irvin was also an outstanding and prolific screenprinter, working principally with Advanced Graphics London over three decades in editions typically of forty-five to seventy-five; those prints are plentiful, well documented and are what most sellers hold. He worked on paper in acrylic and gouache in quantity. The paint is matt, thick and unvarnished, so scuffing and surface dirt are readily visible; canvases are usually signed, titled and dated on the reverse.
At a glance
- Born
- 21 August 1922, Bermondsey
- Died
- 26 March 2015, London
- Movement
- Abstract Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
Northampton, Goldsmiths and the Royal Academy
Irvin was born in Bermondsey and studied at the Northampton School of Art in 1940 and 1941 before the RAF, then at Goldsmiths from 1946 to 1950; he taught there from 1962 to 1983. In the early 1950s he met the St Ives painters Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, Terry Frost and Sandra Blow, who had a lasting effect on his work.
He won a major Arts Council award in 1975 and a Gulbenkian award for printmaking in 1983, and was elected a Royal Academician in 1998. He showed with Gimpel Fils in London, and died in Tooting in March 2015. A print is identified by its title, its edition number and the publisher's documentation.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
