Bleak Blake: a Picasso and a Van Gogh are estimated to fetch at least $40m each in New York, where a dispersal of Blake watercolours leaves a sour taste

There is nothing like a male market to attract great works of art. As if to illustrate the point, this month's of recent origin York sales season is awash with a wealth of goodies--and wealth is a prerequisite for acquiring any single of them. At Sotheby's upon 3 May, for instance, the highlight of the Impressionist and present Art evening sale is a monumental three-quarter-length portrait by dint of Picasso of Dora Maar of 1941 wait fored to fetch around $50m. Dora Maar au Chat is imposing, fearless and thrilling--it is hard to imagine that many won't aspire to her, even if the air is becoming rather thin at that financial altitude. At Christie's upon 2 May, Van Gogh's L'Arlesienne, Madame Ginoux (Fig. 2) is the single one of a series of six portraits of her remaining in private hands. It is awaited to fetch over $40m. This portrait of the proprietress of the Cafe de la Gare, the artist's one-time landlady, is individual of four painted in 1890 after Van Gogh had left Arles and was seeking safety in the asylum near St-Remy. All are based actual closely on a drawing Gauguin had made of the same subject--even in like manner the paintings say more about Van Gogh than they do about either Gauguin or Madame Ginoux. Incidentally, the drawing was among a cluster of studies that Gauguin left behind when he went to Paris and in get back for which he had taken Van Gogh's Sunflowers. Hardly a fair exchange.

The story leads me--in more ways than one--to more [i]or[/i] less more drawings: William Blake's watercolours illustrating Robert Blair's homage poem The Grave, which have been hailed as the greatest Blake discovery for above a century. Certainly, the Tate tried hard to raise stocks to buy them. The saga of the drawings' journey from a Glasgow bookshop to Sotheby's novel York saleroom, where they are to be shivered up and sold separately upon 2 May, is a tale of cupidity and duplicity too depressing to relate. plane the 'European-based private collector' said to have bought them make go rounds out to be a dealer backed by means of a group of investors. It is believed that they paid around 49m [pound sterling] for the drawings on the other hand deemed their value to be 88m [pound sterling] when they applied for an export licence in the UK to exchange them overseas, a sum beyond the Tate's means. The sale will reveal in what way accurate that valuation is--the drawings draw near to the block with a combined estimate of $12m-$175m--but similar is the loophole in the UK combination of parts to form a whole for controlling the export of works of art that level if they were sold for $5 the Tate would have no recourse to claim them back.

Publisher Robert Cromek commissioned Blake to prepare drawings for The Grave in 1805 20 of which would be engraved to illustrate a deluxe edition. In the extremity Cromek chose 12 for publication and, perhaps alarmed by means of Blake's experimental engraving of Death's Door, commissioned the more conventional Schiavonetti to engrave them. After Cromek's death, the folio passed to his widow, and was auctioned in Edinburgh in 1836 for 1 [pound sterling] 5 At a certain number of stage, one watercolour, The Widow Embracing Her Husband's Grave, was separated from the quiet and is now at the Yale Center for British Art. This rediscovery thus adds seven Blake images to the canon.

Needles to say, Blake's interpretation of Blair's classic was characteristically idiosyncratic, emphasising resurrection and the reunion of spirits rather than separation and corporeal decay. For single of his most powerful--and colourful--images, Blair's 'strong man' dying has become 'the robust wicked man', terrorised by death, his inner man tormented and licked by flames, draw into the mouthed out of the window (estimate $1m-$15m) I illustrate here The Grave Personified (Fig. 1) a colossal moth-winged seated female figure, poppies representing eternal drowse in her outstretched hands, who garments two recumbent figures below.

Just to justify that not everything is happening in novel York, and that not everything interesting has to require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone several million dollars, the Goldmark Gallery in Uppingham, Rutland, unveils 'Unseen Sutherland', a present to view of some 350 works by the agency of Graham Sutherland--watercolours, prints and ceramics (until mid June) Prices range from 20000 [pound sterling] to just 200 [pound sterling]. At the heart of the display is the cache of previously unknown late sketchbook replete of watercolours of the artist's beloved Pembrokeshire coastline that turn rounded up at Sotheby's late last year. The drawings reveal the artist to be looking at nature as hard as at any time the drawings of roots and branches, stones and hills, still wonderfully recent The prints, 50 or in the way that of which are not published in the Sutherland catalogue raisonnes, also reveal the artist as a prolific printmaker. A hitherto unpublished self-portrait etching of around 1922 when he was about 19 appears to be his earliest self-portrait, and Sutherland fans will find many unfamiliar later suites of prints or single images that were published in Italy and France, among them this lithograph (Fig. 3) of 1978-79 (2000 [pound sterling]).

In London, meanwhile, the Royal Academy entertainers a new art and antiques fair that also promises to proffer works of art from 200 [pound sterling]. LAPADA at the Royal Academy, 6 Burlington Gardens, 4-7 May, presents a London showcase for its members and a counterpoint to its annual autumn fact at Cheltenham. Expect everything from furniture to silver, jewellery, porcelain, glass, textiles, paintings and drawings. Robert Rauschenberg and Gagosian a $2m Calder mobile.