Christopher Le Brun

Christopher Le Brun was born in 1951 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, earning a Diploma in Fine Art from 1970 to 1974, before completing an MA at the Chelsea School of Art from 1974 to 1975. He was twice a prizewinner in the John Moores Painting Prize in Liverpool, in 1978 and 1980, and received the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's Printmakers Award in 1983. In 1982 his work appeared in the landmark group exhibition Zeitgeist at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, and from 1987 to 1988 he was a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme.

Le Brun's paintings, prints, and bronze sculptures return repeatedly to a small set of charged, romantic motifs, most often horses and moons, worked through a language that moves between figuration and abstraction. This combination of mythic imagery and painterly abstraction has defined his practice across five decades.

In December 2011 he was elected President of the Royal Academy of Arts, reportedly the youngest to hold the post since Lord Leighton in 1878, and he served until stepping down in December 2019 to return to full-time studio work. He was knighted in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to the arts. He continues to work today; sources describe his home and studio variably as being in Somerset and in London, a discrepancy the dossier could not resolve with certainty. He is currently represented by Lisson Gallery and by Almine Rech, and has had recent solo exhibitions at both galleries as well as at Albertz Benda in New York and at institutions including the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing.

Le Brun's reputation rests heavily on institutional recognition rather than a large body of published criticism captured in the dossier. His election to the Royal Academy presidency in 2011, at a notably young age for the role, and his 2021 knighthood both signal broad establishment regard within British art. His recurring return to horse and moon imagery, worked through both abstraction and figuration, has been a consistent throughline noted across gallery and museum exhibition texts from the 1980s through his most recent shows in 2025 and 2026.

The clearest documented auction result for Le Brun is Union (Horse with Two Discs), a 2001 bronze sculpture that sold for GBP 163,800 in June 2023 at Christie's, London, a result reported by the British Art Fair's BLAST market report and corroborated by Artsy and MutualArt auction-result listings. The exact day of the sale is not specified in the sources reviewed. No higher public auction result for the artist has been identified through 2026. Compared to his museum profile, his auction footprint is thin, with relatively few high-value lots coming to market.

Le Brun's market is defined more by institutional depth and sustained gallery representation than by a well-tested auction record. The documented auction high, a bronze sculpture that sold for GBP 163,800 in June 2023, is corroborated across the British Art Fair's market report and independent auction-database listings, though the exact sale date has not been pinned down. There is no catalogue raisonne, which places added weight on verification through his representing galleries and the artist's own studio.