LONDON.- Sotheby’s Made in Britain auction is a vibrant celebration of the diversity and creativity of British art from 1900 to the present day, across Fine Art, Prints, Sculpture, Photography, Studio Ceramics, and Design. The sale encompasses over 200 striking artworks by sought-after artists including Grayson Perry, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst to name but a handful. The eclectic exhibition goes on view to the public on 23 September - starring modern muses in Pop Art, photographs from the Swinging Sixties, colourful Post-War canvases and Contemporary prints perfect for a new buyer’s first foray into collecting - ahead of the auction on 28 September.

MODERN MUSES
The auction presents stunning images of the icons of style that have inspired photographers and artists throughout the 20th-century.

Chris Levine’s luminous photographs of Kate Moss are rare depictions of one of the greatest muses of a generation; the pulsating, meditative energy of Levine’s iconic style capturing the radiant glow of a cultural icon. Levine seeks to illuminate the power inherent in stillness and although his subjects are among the most photographed people in the world, he has a knack for capturing them at rest, as if in the calm of a storm. This work follows his celebrated photograph of The Queen with her eyes closing in 2004.

Reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s graphic celebrity portraiture, namely the Marilyn Monroe portfolio of 1967, Banksy’s Kate Moss, 2011 (est. £30,000-50,000) recreates an iconic Pop image. Banksy is renowned for critiquing contemporary society and questioning consumer culture through his art, and in this series he comments on how celebrity culture has changed and how public figures can become immortalised through art.

In the same year as Banksy’s depiction, Marc Quinn rendered the model in three dimensions in his spray-painted bronze multiple, Sleeping Beauty (est. £5,000-7,000). When asked what it was that drew him to sculpting celebrities, Quinn replied: ‘It's about wanting to make art about our time. If you were an artist in ancient Greece, you'd make a sculpture of Aphrodite. An artist now with the same idea would make one of Kate Moss. The sculpture of Kate Moss is not that of a real person, it’s a cultural hallucination, an image of perfection we live up to.'

Lord Patrick Litchfield’s photograph captures the Queen off-duty on board the HMY Britannia (est. £800-1,200). Lichfield was a cousin of the Queen, and thus privy to far more private shots of her. In 1971, he was invited to join the royal party for a section of the Queen’s Far Eastern tour, in order to produce photographs to mark her Silver Wedding anniversary in November 1972. During the trip, Lichfield was dunked in the pool: ‘But’, he wrote, ‘I did have the wit to take a waterproof camera with me and when I came up for about the third time, I took a picture of The Queen up on the bridge laughing at me.’

Brian Duffy’s photograph of David Bowie (est. £8,000-12,000) was the result of a magical photographic shoot for the cover of Aladdin Sane, Bowie’s 1973 album – an iconic image of a man whose visual style influenced a generation.

The sale also presents a plethora of images of Marilyn Monroe, from an oil and collage work by Pop Artist Sir Peter Blake (est. £18,000-25,000) to photographs by Sir Cecil Beaton and Eve Arnold.

Arnold was the first woman to be admitted into the esteemed photo agency Magnum, photographing many of the iconic figures who shaped the second half of the 20th-century. Monroe only came to the UK once in her lifetime, for four months in the summer of 1956. In this photograph (est. £8,000-12,000) she is shown at a press meeting at the Ritz during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl with Sir Laurence Olivier.

SCHOOL OF LONDON & COLLECTION OF RAYMOND JONES
In 1976 the artist R.B. Kitaj coined the term ‘School of London’ to describe a group of artists working in London who pursued forms of figurative painting in the face of the ever-growing strength of avant-garde and abstract movements. At its heart stood Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews and Lucian Freud. A strong selection of works by these artists is led by Lucian Freud’s print Blond Girl from 1985 (est. £20,000-40,000).

In the 1960s, Freud’s portraits caught the eye of the fashionable interior decorator Raymond Jones, and Jones’ purchase of a Freud portrait of his lover George Dyer brought the pair into contact with each other. Freud was fascinated by Jones – his quirky, mischievous character and flowing PreRaphaelite hair – and he soon became the subject of a number of highly individual portraits, including Naked Man With Rat – his first depicting a male nude. Each day, the rat was dosed with sleeping tablets dissolved into a dog’s bowl of Veuve Cliquot, keeping it docile for nine months until the work was completed.

It was because of this that Jones earned the nickname ‘Rat Man’, as seen in Rat Man (Portrait of Raymond) (est. £4,0006,000) – a gift to Jones drawn on a diary page from 1978, the year the artist painted Jones again in Naked Man With His Friend. The sale includes works given from Freud to Jones, including Mornington Crescent (est. £3,000-5,000) by Frank Auerbach.

QUINTISENTIALLY BRITISH WORKS
One of Britain’s most beloved artists, Beryl Cook lived for most of her life in Plymouth on the South Coast. Together with her husband her ‘chief pleasure in life came in the evenings, when [they] would visit one or two of a number of small local pubs’. Her favourite was The Dolphin, and there she was fascinated by the colourful characters she saw, incorporating them into her paintings.

Oldham-born Helen Bradley began painting at the age of 65, to show her grandchildren what life was like at the turn of the century, and soon gained a strong international following for her charmingly quaint and naïve style. In Look, the Queen’s Coming! (est. £40,000-60,000), she tells the story of when she ‘very nearly missed seeing our Dear Queen Alexandra driving along Regent Street with Princess Mary, the Duchess of York’ in 1909 as she was ‘so busy looking at a beautiful shop full of Rose Perfume’.

The sale also offers a wonderfully characterful work by Gary Bunt painted in the artist’s typically naïve style. In The Allotment, 2005 (est. £6,000 – 8,000) he describes the humorous scene, ‘Don’t Look Round, He’s At It Again, He’s Showing Off His Marrow, If Its Down On The Ground When I Walk Round, I’ll Squash It With My Barrow’.

Welsh artist Sir Kyffin Williams remains one of the most popular British landscape artists of the past century, spending decades capturing the Welsh landscape in all its glory. Mount Snowdon from Nantlle (est. £30,000-50,000) is a beautiful example of dramatic sights of Mount Snowden, painted in Kyffin’s instantly recognisable sweeping style.

POST-WAR ABSTRACTION
By the mid-1960s Patrick Heron was at the height of his career, internationally known as one of Britain’s most successful Post-War artists – his paintings instantly recognisable explosions of rich, vivid colour. Complex Cerulean in Dark Green Square: March – August 1977 (est. £50,000-70,000) comes from an exciting period that is defined by a confidence of form and striking presence that is apparent in this work. It was in this period that Heron developed the ‘wobbly hard-edge’ manner, which alluded to the hard-edged abstraction of the New York painters. The purity of colour, together with the scale of the work, results in a startling visual impact.

The sale also offers exciting works by Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, William Scott and Alan Davie, including Parrot Grip No.3 (est. £25,000 – 35,000).

CERAMICS
Responding to the insatiable demand in the market, the sale features an exciting selection of fresh-to-market works by some of the most important ceramicists working in Britain to date – including Jennifer Lee, Magdalene Odundo, Gabriel Koch and John Ward.

Kate Malone’s ‘Daisy’ Vase (est. £1,200-1,800) is a glossy explosion of unrestrained tutti-frutti colours. Malone was one of the judges on BBC 2’s The Great Pottery Throw Down last year, which continued to fuel the British fascination with sculptural and decorative ceramics.

ST IVES SCHOOL
The coastal town of St Ives has been known as a haven for artists for many generations - playing a pivotal position within the history of 20th-century British art.

It was to St Ives that Ben Nicholson and his wife Winifred Nicholson travelled to, stumbling across the cottage of the mariner Alfred Wallis, who was to have a profound impact over their artist development. Ben painted the rooftops from his house Trezion, situated at the top of a steep alley called Salubrious Place, whilst Winifred depicted fresh flowers artfully arranged in jugs and vases looking out onto the sea beyond.

The sale offers exciting paintings by the couple, led by Ben Nicholson’s St Ives Rooftop – Vessels and Boats, circa 1951 (est. £50,000-70,000) and Winifred Nicholson’s Flowers, circa 1950 (est. £40,000-60,000).

DESIGN
A ‘Glacier’ Bench from the ‘Z-Scape’ Series designed in 2000 by the late visionary architect Zaha Hadid will be offered with an estimate of £7,000-10,000. Dubbed ‘Queen of the Curve’, Hadid transformed the landscape of modern architecture, with highly expressive, sweeping forms. Her poetic and futuristic works cross the divides of art, architectural design and functionality.