David Jagger

David Jagger was born in 1891 in Kilnhurst, near Rotherham, in Yorkshire, England, into an artistic family; his brother Charles Sargeant Jagger became a noted sculptor and his sister Edith Jagger was also a painter. He trained at the Sheffield School of Art, also called the Sheffield Technical School of Art, alongside his siblings, leaving in 1912 as a medal-winning student in mural design and painting. No formal degree from this period is documented. After leaving art school he worked as a black-and-white illustrator for the Sheffield Telegraph before moving into portrait painting.

Through the 1920s and 1930s Jagger built a career painting establishment figures: his sitters included Queen Mary, whose portrait he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1930, the businessman J. G. Graves, and Robert Baden-Powell, whose 1929 portrait is often cited as among his most celebrated works. In 1926 he produced a series of black-and-white portraits of British aviators and racing drivers, later acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London. He became a leading member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and he exhibited regularly with the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Academy throughout his career. He held a solo exhibition at J. Leger and Son, London, in 1935, and in 1939 and 1940 he showed alongside his siblings in the touring exhibition The Art of the Jagger Family, which traveled to museums in Halifax, Darlington, Lincoln, Rotherham, and Sunderland.

Jagger died in 1958. Major reference sources, including Wikipedia, Art UK, the Artists' Collecting Society, and the Art Renewal Center, consistently give his life dates as 1891 to 1958, but none of the sources reviewed provide an exact death date or place, and no obituary or probate record confirming those details has been located.

Reception of Jagger centers on his standing as a leading society portrait painter of the interwar years, valued for a strong likeness and meticulous technical craftsmanship rather than any claim to stylistic innovation. His 1930 Royal Academy portrait of Queen Mary and his 1928 self-portrait, later his auction-record work, are the two paintings most frequently cited in this context. No named critic or dated, verbatim review of his work is confirmed in the sources reviewed for this profile, so specific critical assessments are not quoted here.

Jagger's market is small and concentrated at the top end. His auction high is Self Portrait, painted in 1928, which sold for GBP 221,000 at Bonhams in London on 14 June 2017, more than seven times its pre-sale estimate; Bonhams described the result at the time as a world auction record for the artist, a record that later coverage did not report as having been surpassed. No published catalogue raisonne exists, though Sworders auctioneers has described an in-progress catalogue raisonne project that recently incorporated a group of factory-commissioned portraits.

Jagger's market has very few public sales, so any single result, including his GBP 221,000 record, should be read as an outlier rather than a stable benchmark. The absence of a published catalogue raisonne, with a research project reportedly still underway, places extra weight on provenance, exhibition history, and verification through specialist dealers such as those who regularly handle his work. His strongest validation signal is institutional: a series of his portraits is held by the National Portrait Gallery, and a documented history of exhibiting at the Royal Academy, the Walker Art Gallery, and other major venues anchors his reputation even where the auction record is thin.