Maggi Hambling valuation
Paints the North Sea in a gale, and made the shell on Aldeburgh beach that people still argue about.
Maggi Hambling was born at Sudbury in Suffolk in 1945, studied under Cedric Morris and Lett Haines and then at Camberwell and the Slade, and was the first artist in residence at the National Gallery in 1980.
What a work by Maggi Hambling is worth
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Bio
Maggi Hambling was born at Sudbury in Suffolk in 1945, studied under Cedric Morris and Lett Haines and then at Camberwell and the Slade, and was the first artist in residence at the National Gallery in 1980. The best-known works are public and contentious: the Oscar Wilde memorial near Charing Cross and Scallop, the four-metre steel shell on the shingle at Aldeburgh, which has been vandalised repeatedly and defended just as often. The painting is dominated by two long sequences, the portraits — including the series of the dying Henrietta Moraes — and the North Sea waves, painted fast in heavy oil, often at first light.
The oils, generally on canvas and frequently square, are unique, and the wave paintings are the most sought part of the work. Alongside them sits a large body of drawings, monotypes and etchings, and the monotypes are unique impressions notwithstanding their printed appearance. Portraits raise the usual practical question of sitter identification, which affects saleability more than most people expect. Signature and date are usually on the reverse. She has published editioned prints through named publishers, and those carry the standard pencil signature and numbering.
Scallop, the monotypes and the etchings
Hambling's best-known public work is Scallop, the steel shell on the beach at Aldeburgh, put up in 2003 as a tribute to Benjamin Britten and cut with a line from his opera Peter Grimes: I hear those voices that will not be drowned. The North Sea there became the subject of the wave paintings. Separately, she began making monotypes in the printmaking studio at Morley College, working with the printer Frank Connelly, and the British Museum bought her first series, studies of the nude.
Each monotype is a single impression, unique despite being printed, and should be described that way. Her etchings, by contrast, are editioned, often in small numbers such as twenty, and signed and numbered in pencil. She has shown with Marlborough Fine Art in London for many years, and the gallery's invoices and catalogues are the usual documentation for paintings, monotypes and prints alike.
Benton End, Max Wall and Dorothy Hodgkin
Hambling's mother taught ballroom dancing, and her father, a Barclays bank cashier, took up oil painting at sixty with paints she gave him and went on to have seven solo shows. She first studied art under Yvonne Drewry at the Amberfield School in Nacton, went to Benton End in 1960, and then to Ipswich School of Art from 1962 to 1964 before Camberwell and the Slade, where she graduated in 1969. Her National Gallery residency produced a series of portraits of the comedian Max Wall, who answered her request with a letter asking what colour.
The National Portrait Gallery commissioned her portrait of Dorothy Hodgkin in 1985, which gives the scientist four hands, each busy with a different task, and holds several more of her portraits. A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft, in London, is her third public work to have drawn controversy, after the Wilde memorial and Scallop. She has taught at Wimbledon School of Art, had a solo exhibition at the Hermitage in St Petersburg in 2013, and is a patron of the charity Paintings in Hospitals. Her work is in the British Museum, Tate, the National Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the V&A.
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