RAPHAEL, SARAH (1960-2001)

**PRICE ON APPLICATION**
 
"Mythology Series" (8 works) (c.1989)
mixed medias 
each 44 x 29cm
each signed
*exhibited Agnew's Fine Art Dealers, London
*James Fairfax Collection
 
Sarah Raphael was described as one of Britain's finest figurative painters when she died tragically at the age of 40, leaving her circle of artist and writer friends (poet laureate Andrew Motion, actor Daniel Day-Lewis and the writers William Boyd and Clive James) numb with grief. She was an award-winning painter, draughtsman and printmaker, born in Suffolk, daughter of the writer famous, Frederic Raphael. She was from childhood an obsessive artist, at Bedales being granted a dormitory pass allowing her to work late at night. In 1981 she obtained a first-class honours degree from Camberwell School of Art and gained the Iraqi Cultural Award. She participated in group shows at Whitechapel Art Gallery, Morley Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, and the Gillian Jason and Albemarle Galleries. She had a solo show at Christopher Hull Gallery in 1985, others at Agnew in 1989 and 1992. Won the NatWest Art Prize, 1996. Raphael was renowned as a leading portrait and landscape painter; her scenes including animals and figures sometimes have a strange, other-worldly quality. By the mid-1990s, Raphael’s work had undergone a major change, her paintings of the Australian desert inhabiting a strange world between naturalism and abstraction, with some identifiable references.