Richard Feigen collection at Dreweatts

The collection of renowned art dealer Richard Feigen will be offered by Berkshire auction house Dreweatts in their upcoming sale Tales from the Art Crypt: Works from the Richard Feigen Collection.

The sale on July 2 includes three standout paintings spanning Romanticism and Modernism, which highlight not only the individual artists but Feigen’s larger vision as a dealer and collector.

Grosser Steinbruch in Oberbayern (Large Quarry in Upper Bavaria) by Max Beckmann (1884-1950) is an oil on canvas with an estimate of £500,000-700,000 in the sale.

Described by Feigen as ‘the twentieth century artist I cherish the most’, this landscape was painted during Beckmann’s final years in Nazi Germany before his exile, the landscape symbolising the artist’s psychological unrest and the broader social fracture under the tightening grip of fascism. Art historians, including Barbara Copeland Buenger, interpret the work as an encoded cry of resistance, one that aligns with Beckmann’s trajectory as a central figure in the Neue Sachlichkeit movement and later a prominent target of the Nazi “Degenerate Art” campaign.

Of the very limited 16 works painted in or around Ohlstadt, only a few survive in private hands – others reside in major institutions like MoMA, the Wiesbaden and Cologne museums, and the Staatsgalerie in Munich. Two were lost during WWII, heightening the rarity of this piece.

Elsewhere in the sale, and making its market debut, is Samuel Palmer’s The Gleaning Field, which offers a rare and glimpse into the visionary heart of British Romanticism has an estimate of £300,000-500,000. Painted during the artist’s celebrated Shoreham years and inspired by the spirit of William Blake, this evocative pastoral is one of the few surviving oils from Palmer’s most creative period still in private hands. 

With its luminous brushwork and haunting rural nostalgia, the painting captures a vanishing agrarian world and showcases the artist’s extraordinary command of light, colour, and atmosphere.

Estimated at £120,000-180,000 is an atmospheric oil sketch by Richard Parkes Bonington which offers a rare and luminous example of his short-lived but highly influential career. Dated to early 1826, just before Bonington’s pivotal tour of Italy, the painting embodies a critical moment of artistic maturity. It reflects stylistic affinities with Turner and Constable, yet uniquely filtered through Bonington’s hallmark technique: applying oils with the lightness of a watercolourist.

The work’s provenance adds historical resonance: originally owned by Louis-Joseph-Auguste Coutan, a key patron in Parisian artistic circles and friend of Delacroix, who famously praised Bonington’s unmatched delicacy and brilliance. This painting, likely part of Coutan’s lavish Place Vendôme collection, remained in the family until 1996 and has been privately held since.