Craigie Aitchison
Crucifixions, Bedlington terriers and Holy Isle, in colour laid down flat and left alone.
Craigie Aitchison was born in Edinburgh in 1926, the son of a Lord Advocate, and was reading law when he changed course for the Slade in 1952. A scholarship took him to Italy, where the early Renaissance painters settled the manner he kept for the rest of his life: small canvases, no modelling to speak of, and flat saturated colour — a crucifixion against pink, a Bedlington terrier, a single fruit on a table, the outline of Goatfell seen from Holy Isle. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1988 and made a CBE, and he died in 2009 having painted essentially the same handful of subjects for fifty years.
The paintings are small, usually oil on canvas or board, and the colour is applied thinly in fields that show every later touch, so retouching and overpaint are conspicuous and matter more than they would on a worked surface. He also had a substantial published print output — screenprints and lithographs of the crucifixions and the dogs, in editions — and those come to auction far more often than the paintings do. Signature, edition number and publisher are the things to record on a print, and the sheet should not have been trimmed to fit a frame.
If you own a work by Craigie Aitchison
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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