Albert Irvin
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. 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.
If you own a work by Albert Irvin
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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