Antony Donaldson

Antony Donaldson was born on 2 September 1939 in Godalming, Surrey, England. He studied briefly at Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art in 1957 and 1958 before moving to the Slade School of Fine Art, London, where he spent four years as an undergraduate, from 1958 to 1962, and then held a Postgraduate Scholarship in Fine Art at University College London from 1962 to 1963.

He held his first one-man show at the Rowan Gallery, London, in 1963, and the following year was included in The New Generation: 1964 at the Whitechapel Gallery, the exhibition that helped define British Pop art as a movement. A Harkness Foundation Fellowship took him to the United States from 1966 to 1968, and he returned to a long, steady exhibition career in London, including a further solo show, Antony Donaldson: Portraits, at the Rowan Gallery in 1972. He continues to live and work between London and southwest France, and his gallery record extends into recent years with shows at The Mayor Gallery in London, Galerie Laurent Strouk in Paris, and Gallery Bastejs in Riga, alongside a 2026 group presentation with Christie's on modern British art. He should not be confused with unrelated individuals sharing the name Anthony or Antony Donaldson who appear in obituary or professional listings unconnected to the art world.

Donaldson's critical standing rests largely on his early inclusion in The New Generation: 1964 at the Whitechapel Gallery, the exhibition credited with defining the British Pop generation, and on the steady institutional collecting that followed, including acquisition by the Tate. He has continued to be written about across his career, including a later interview feature in Studio International, but the available sources do not preserve an exact, attributable critical quotation from a major outlet that can be reproduced here with confidence.

Antony Donaldson's auction market is thin and unevenly documented. The Mayor Gallery's own digital catalogue describes a painting, For Jim Clark of the Early No. 84 (1963), as having been "recently honoured with a record auction price for a Donaldson" of GBP 248,000, but no publicly available source names the auction house, sale location, or exact date for that result, so those details are treated here as unconfirmed. Outside that single reported high, French market-valuation summaries place typical auction prices for his paintings in a much lower range, roughly EUR 70 to EUR 34,000, with drawings and watercolors generally selling for less. The gap between the reported record and the routine range suggests a market with very few high-value transactions and a large number of modest ones.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Antony Donaldson, so provenance and authentication weigh more heavily on the artist's own archive and on the galleries that have represented him, particularly The Mayor Gallery and Galerie Laurent Strouk. His single reported auction record of GBP 248,000 lacks a confirmed sale house, location, or date, and sits well above the routine price range documented for his work, so it should be treated as a data point to verify rather than a reliable market benchmark. As a living artist with an active, ongoing exhibition schedule, current representation and recent gallery activity are likely to be more informative for collectors than the sparse auction history.