Craigie Aitchison valuation
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.
What a work by Craigie Aitchison is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 13 January 1926, Edinburgh
- Died
- 21 December 2009, St Mary's Gardens
- Movement
- Contemporary art
More on Wikipedia.
Liverpool, Truro and the Bedlingtons
Aitchison's interest in the Crucifixion began in 1951, when he saw Dalí's Christ of St John of the Cross soon after Kelvingrove in Glasgow had bought it. He painted a Calvary for Truro Cathedral in 1996 and another for Liverpool Cathedral the following year, and further religious works are in the chapel of King's College, Cambridge. His first Bedlington terrier, Wayney, came from Crufts in 1971.
His first solo exhibition was at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1959. There were retrospectives at the Serpentine Gallery in 1981 and the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow in 1996, and an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2003. He lived for 35 years in the same house in Kennington and also worked in Italy, and Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland hold his work.
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