A RECORD price at auction could be reached for a work by one of Scotland's leading painters this month.
A work by Alison Watt, Madame Riviére – Fragment V, could be sold for £80,000 at sale at Sotheby's in London on 18 June.
The diptych - two paintings on one - was created in 1996/7 and is being sold in the Modern and Post-War British Art sale by a private collector.
Sotheby's said: "In the work, Watt re-imagines Ingres’ Portrait of Marie-Françoise Rivière (1805), adopting the sensuous pose of the sitter, and depicting the luxurious folds of fabric in hyper-realistic detail.
"Yet Watt forges her own path, juxtaposing the drapery with the severely cropped female figure so that the series of curves and folds echo the wrinkles and creases of the body."
Ms Watt, a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, currently has an exhibition at the Parafin gallery in London, A Shadow on the Blind.
The current world auction record for a work by Alison Watt is a 1996 piece from this same series - it achieved £78,000 at Sotheby’s in 2007.
Madame Riviére – Fragment V has an estimate of £60,000 to £80,000.
The work was first shown at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in late 1997.
Ingres has long been an inspiration for the painter, being struck by his Madame Moitessier (1856) on a visit to the National Gallery, London, as a child.
She once said: "Whenever I look at Madame Moitessier I find myself being drawn away from her face, which is looking at me.
"My eye always drops to the fabric of the dress and I find myself becoming lost in that area of the painting. "The longer you look at it, the stranger it becomes because your eye begins to play tricks on you. The fabric moves in and out of focus, certain areas loom forward, others recede."
Sotheby's catalogue for the sale notes: "The highly figurative nude references her earlier more representational style, such as her seminal portrait of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (1989), whilst the abstracted counters of the softly folding fabrics are prophetic of her more recent work, including her 2000 exhibition Shift at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, which featured twelve large- scale paintings, taking materials as their sole subject matter."
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