Most of the works were provenanced to Haunch of Venison, a gallery founded in 2002 by businessman turned art dealer Harry Blain, and former Christie’s art expert Graham Southern. In 2007, Christie’s bought Haunch of Venison to boost its private sales of contemporary art, but five years later closed it down. Coventry believes his work had been kept in storage by Christie’s ever since. 

As the artist explains, they were originally part of a series of 42 works called “Echoes of Albany”, referring to the remarkable Albany apartments and gardens close to the Royal Academy where politicians including William Gladstone and Edward Heath, literary figures Lord Byron and JB Priestley, and artists such as the photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones and Coventry himself have lived since they were built for bachelors in the late 18th century. 

For this series, he adopted the distinctive late style of the great British artist Walter Sickert, who emerged from Post-Impressionism using photography to capture images like painterly film stills. The series was first exhibited in Coventry’s 2006 retrospective held at the Tramway Gallery in Glasgow, courtesy of Haunch of Venison, and was intended, he says, to be kept intact. But the gallery sold off many of the parts. 

Coventry kept 14, and since he has been selling well at Pace, has been attempting to buy examples back to reunite them. In tune with the rest of the sale, estimates at Bellmans were set temptingly low to encourage bidding. Coventry’s Albany pictures were estimated at just £500 each and, with virtually no pre-sale publicity, he was able to buy all seven of his works back against little competition for a cumulative £7,000, not including auctioneer’s commission. 

The lucky museum beneficiary has not yet been agreed, but likely contenders include the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which all staged Sickert exhibitions last year.