Michael Andrews

Michael James Andrews was born on 30 October 1928 in Norwich, England. He attended the City of Norwich School from 1939 to 1947 and, in his final school year, took Saturday morning oil-painting classes at the Norwich School of Art with the painter Leslie Davenport. He completed National Service between 1947 and 1949, spending roughly nineteen months in Egypt, where he painted watercolors in his free time.

From 1949 to 1953 he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London under William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, William Townsend, and Lawrence Gowing. In 1953 he received a Rome Scholarship in Painting from the British School at Rome and spent about six months in Italy. In 1966, like Bacon and Freud before him, he signed a contract with the Marlborough Gallery, which allowed him to paint full time. His work moved across nocturnal London interiors, group and party scenes, aerial and topographic landscapes made after a trip to Australia, and, in his final years, large paintings of the Thames estuary and the sea.

Andrews was treated for cancer in his final years and died on 19 July 1995, in London, at the age of 66. His last major work, Thames Painting: The Estuary, was completed in the period around his death.

Andrews's reputation rests less on volume of output than on the regard of his peers and on sustained institutional attention, including praise from fellow painter Frank Auerbach noted by Christie's. A 1980 retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London and a career-spanning exhibition at Tate Britain both anchored his standing among the School of London painters. His death in 1995 was reported by major outlets including the New York Times, and later scholarship, together with the March 2025 auction record, has renewed attention to his work.

Andrews's auction record is School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna, a 1978 acrylic-on-canvas painting from his "School" series of underwater scenes, which sold for GBP 6,060,000 (about USD 7.77 million) at Christie's in London on 5 March 2025. That result beat his previous record, USD 3.98 million for School III: Butterfly Fish and Damsel Fish at Christie's in March 2024, by about 95 percent within a single year. Per data compiled by HENI, his market has generated about USD 19.73 million in cumulative auction turnover over the past 23 years, including about USD 7.78 million in the last three years, a pattern consistent with a small, slowly traded body of work rather than a deep, liquid market.

No catalogue raisonne of Andrews's work has been identified in current research, so provenance and verification depend on the galleries handling the estate, principally Gagosian and James Hyman Gallery, and on the historical Marlborough Gallery contract from 1966. His auction supply is thin: a small number of sales each year and a body of work concentrated in a handful of major series (the London interiors, the aerial landscapes, the "School" paintings, and the late Thames pictures). That scarcity is part of why a single strong sale, such as the March 2025 record, can move the market's headline number substantially, and why individual results should be read against the specific series and moment of sale rather than as a smooth trend line. His death from cancer in 1995, well documented in contemporary obituaries, ended a working life that was already unusually compact for an artist of his stature.