Following the success of ‘The Cult of Beauty’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sotheby’s is delighted to be offering an important example of the work of the Aesthetic Movement’s most sophisticated exponents, Albert Joseph Moore. Waiting to Cross depicts three beautiful women in Grecian robes standing at a riverbank, one of whom glances over her shoulder at the viewer.

The winter sale also offers a striking painting by Edmund Blair Leighton, one of the finest painters of medieval romance. His Stitching the Standard shows a maiden with super-model looks sitting on the battlements of a tower. The Newlyn School is well represented in the sale, with two significant works by Walter Langley and a varied group of watercolours, oil paintings and a bronze by Henry Scott Tuke. Tuke’s Return from Fishing captures the artist’s love of Cornwall, its people and its traditions in a large painting that was owned by the famous Indian cricketer Ranjitsighi.

The sale also includes a wide variety of paintings, drawings and watercolours with pictures by John Atkinson Grimshaw, Archibald Thorburn, John William Godward, Arthur Elsley and William James Blacklock.