Greetings from Australia.

I’m a post-grad student at University of Sydney and am writing a thesis involving Southampton artist Sidney Goodwin.

I was hoping that someone might be able to throw some light on this painting.

I am in the second year of my Master of Art Curating degree at the University of Sydney and my thesis is titled The Importance of Status: Is Recognition of Artistic Merit Contingent on an Artist’s Reputation?

It was inspired by attempts to rationalise the massive disparity in auction hammer prices that exists between artists who occupied similar temporal and geographic spaces and produced work of similar quality.

Superficially the price differential is best explained by a variance in the status of artists and I am illustrating this by comparing a number of British and Australian artists, some highly regarded and some much less so.

Sidney Goodwin, in my humble opinion, produced work of good quality but never achieved the critical and commercial success of his uncle Albert Goodwin.

I compare auction sale results for these men and argue that the pre-sale auction estimate is a major determinant of price, that the assessment of art undertaken to establish these estimates relies too heavily on basic comparisons with historical sales data rather than genuine appraisals by experts using their acquired art knowledge and that this process becomes increasingly prevalent in lower-tier auctions due to commercial time constraints.

I was in Southampton early this year and visited the Southampton City Art Gallery.

The staff there invited me into the basement storage rooms and were very generous in allowing me access to the collection for my study.

I was hoping that any Daily Echo Readers might be able to identify this watercolour:

It was painted by Goodwin in 1914 and I think it may be the old bridge at Redbridge but the square tower and the row of red brick houses don’t look like any modern photos I can find.

If anyone can help please email me on smar7417@uni.sydney.edu.au

Steve Marshall

New South Wales