Sir Winston Churchill, On the Rhine, oil on canvas, circa 1930 (est. £70,000-100,000)
Continuing Sotheby’s unrivalled experience of offering works by Sir Winston Churchill, November’s sale features three paintings by Britain’s most famous Prime Minister, including On the Rhine, appearing at auction for the very first time. This view of the Rhine was most likely painted by Sir Winston Churchill when he visited Germany in 1932, whilst touring the battlefields to write the biography of his famous ancestor the First Duke of Marlborough. The trip was a mere six months before Hitler took power and, famously, the two came the closest they ever would to meeting face-to-face. Given this timing, the importance of the Rhine in the Second World War, and the extraordinary role that Churchill was to play, this painting takes on an added significance as an important historical visual document, painted at a politically sensitive time in a hotly contended area.

Euan Uglow, Striding Figure, oil on canvas, 1975 (est. £200,000- 300,000)
Being offered on the market for the first time since it was acquired directly from the artist, Striding Figure is the first of four near life-size works depicting the model Alex Morland and encapsulates Euan Uglow’s principal concerns. Ambitious in scale and intent, the painting is a rigorous examination of anatomy, flesh, movement, geometry, form and the dynamic between painter and model. The blue of Striding Figure, the colour that would become indelibly associated with Uglow’s work, came from the commercial bleach powder, Reckitt’s Blue. For the present work, it was rubbed directly into the wet plaster of the studio wall, fresco-like in colour and substance, and recreated on the canvas. Profoundly influenced by the Early Renaissance, Uglow compared this blue to that of Giotto’s Arena Chapel fresco cycle.

Patrick Heron, Rumbold Vertical Two: Reds with Purple and Orange: March 1970, oil on canvas (est. £120,000-180,000)
‘My main interest, in my painting, has always been in colour, space and light’ Following this summer’s major retrospective of the work of Patrick Heron at Tate St Ives – currently touring to Turner Contemporary, Margate until 2019 – this auction features three masterworks by the artist, showcasing his brilliant and unrivalled understanding of the power of colour in paintings.

ART / IDENTITY / MIGRATION: PROPERTY FROM THE BEN URI GALLERY & MUSEUM Ben Uri was founded in July 1915 in Jewish Whitechapel, East London at the height of the First World War. The founding idea behind the extraordinary initiative was to champion émigré artists and artisans, predominately Jewish, often arriving in London without language or support and consistently spurned by the establishment. As London became home to ever more diverse émigré communities, so the scope of the Ben Uri mission grew to explore and spotlight the contribution of immigrant artists to Britain since 1900 irrespective of origin or ethnicity. As a result of the museum's curatorial re-definition of the Collection and Collecting policies, a number of works will be offered for sale. Proceeds will be reinvested to further the three core areas of focus for Ben Uri going forward:
- The Ben Uri Research Unit, building on work started in 2003, will create an illustrated dictionary, freely available on-line, recording the lives and contributions made to the British Visual Arts by immigrants since 1900.
- The institution’s Acquisition Fund will be significantly bolstered by the sales, enabling the museum to accelerate its Collection and Collecting plans
- The funds will establish the Ben Uri Arts and Dementia Institute, building on work started in 2008, is tasked to develop the UK’s first accredited nationally available set of art interventions for those living with or at risk of dementia.

David Bomberg, At the Window, oil on canvas, 1919 (est. £500,000-800,000)
A powerful portrait of a place and time, painted in the bitter aftermath of the First World War, At the Window captures Bomberg’s post-war disillusionment following the trauma of the trenches, the death of his brother, and his difficult war commission for the Canadian War Memorials’ Fund. The female sitter, dressed in black and reworked from an earlier painting, was modelled by his sister Raie, who had also died in the interim from rheumatic fever. The bold palette and hard-edged modernist style link the painting emphatically to Bomberg’s earlier pre-war avant-garde experiments and to those of his European contemporaries, while the overwhelming sense of confinement ec