A major work by the 20th-century British painter John Minton, which spent years stored in a shed while its owner struggled to find a wall large enough to hang it, has resurfaced more than 60 years after it was last seen in public.
Jamaican Village, an unusually cheerful view of a dusky street corner and a brightly lit bar from an artist not noted for jolly scenes – one critic of an early exhibition commented “Mr Minton is seen to have an overcast, gloomy realism, and much intensity of feeling, which he expresses in dark colour schemes” – was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1951, but has not been seen since.
Minton, now best known as an illustrator, gave the painting to his friend Prof John Norris Wood, himself a noted natural history illustrator. He kept it for the rest of his life, though once offered it for sale through an ad in the Times, hoping to raise enough money to fund a nature reserve. The only person who responded was the late critic Brian Sewell – whose art collection recently fetched £3.7m at auction – but they could not agree a price. It is now being sold by his son.
Minton, whose postwar paintings depicted wrecked London landscapes, was delighted by the light and colour when he visited Jamaica in 1950, and painted this and other scenes when he returned to the St John’s Wood studio he shared with the painter Keith Vaughan.
Minton, charming and handsome but depressive and a heavy drinker, was a well-known figure in bohemian London in the 1930s and 40s. He was regarded as one of the best painters of his generation, but his figurative style became very unfashionable within his short lifetime. His last major work in 1957, now in the Tate collection, dealt with the death in 1955 of the actor James Dean in a car crash. Later that year Minton killed himself, aged just 40.
Jamaican Village will be auctioned at Christie’s on 23 November, estimated at up to £150,000 – a sum that would have astonished its first owner.
