Painting for sale in USA

30th January 2013

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The 10ins by 12ins picture titled Two Hounds Outside A Stable will be auctioned at Bonhams in New York on February 13. The sale coincides with the 250th anniversary of Charles Towne’s birth in Wigan in 1763. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he was baptized in Wigan on July 7 1763. His family was poor and young Charles was selling drawings to bring in money by the age of eight.” In her Dictionary of British Equestrian Artists, Sally Mitchell writes: “He was brought up in poverty and it is said that until the age of eight he sketched on Wigan churchyard tombstones with an old piece of chalk.” The Towne picture, Two Hounds Outside A Stable, is among around 200 paintings and works of art - all canine-themed – in the annual Dogs In Show and Field sale, staged by Bonhams in New York every year. The current world record for a Towne work is £138,650, the sum paid at Christie’s in London on June 12 2002 for his 1809 oil painting, A Bay Hunter and three pointers in a landscape with Lyston Hall beyond. When he died in 1840, Towne left less than £300 in his will.

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