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.
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