Rarely-seen bird paintings by former British Antarctic Survey director Dick Laws set to go under the hammer

 

What an insult! Dick Laws' wandering albatross was first catalogued as a "seagull" 

TWO rarely-seen works by eminent artist/scientist/explorer Dick Laws are up for sale on May 23 at auction in a Lincolnshire market town.

One, an acrylic on board,  depicts a wandering albatross, while the other is a delicate watercolour of cattle egrets.

Northumberland-born Richard Maitland Laws (1926-2014) was an authority on elephants and on sea mammals, publishing numerous scientific reports, but he was also an expert on the pelagic birds of the South Atlantic Ocean. 

It was while working as director of British Antarctic Survey that he tipped off the British Government of the imminent invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 after detecting unlawful activities by the Argentines.

Later in an  illustrious career which saw him awarded the CBE, he served as Master at St Edmund's College, Cambridge University.

Next week's sale is being conducted online and in its saleroom by long- established auction house John Taylors of Louth.

At first, the firm  inadvertently  catalogued the albatross (Lot 458 ) as "a seagull on the sea" and the egrets (Lot 456) as "seabirds" until a keen-eyed birder suggested that corrections might be in order.

Originals by Laws seldom come up for sale, one of the most recent being at Bonhams in London in February 2019 when the hammer came down at £500 on his watercolour-and-pencil study of a squid which he had caught by hand.

More details of the sale at:

https://www.johntaylors.com/auction-rooms/ 

                                                             

Egrets survey the surrounding scenery