# Douglas Portway artist context and auction value notes

Canonical page: https://appraisily.com/artist/douglas-portway/
Profile generated: 2026-08-24T15:40:50.632Z
Quality: medium confidence, adequate sources

## Artist identity

- Nationality: South African
- Common media: Painting

## About Douglas Portway

Douglas Portway (1922–1993) was a painter represented in several international authority systems and in Tate’s artist index. The collected records agree on his name, occupation, and life years, but they differ in their national description: VIAF exposes a German National Library description identifying him as South African, while Wikidata labels him British. The South African description is retained here provisionally because it comes through a national-library authority record, while the disagreement remains open for further research. Painting is the only artistic medium securely established by the available source excerpts. The pack does not provide enough evidence to assign Portway to a specific movement, identify recurring subjects, or describe distinct periods or series. Collectors may encounter his name through paintings offered in the auction market, museum collection indexes, and cataloguing records, but individual works require separate examination before claims about technique, date, authorship, or significance are made.

## Common works and media

Painting is the only common work type securely supported by the collected identity sources. The pack does not establish whether works encountered at auction are predominantly oils, works on paper, prints, or another specific format, and it provides no reliable basis for naming recurring subjects, editions, series, or periods. Those characteristics should be taken from the individual object and its documented catalogue record rather than inferred from the artist’s general identity profile.

## Market and appraisal context

The available evidence establishes Douglas Portway as a painter and confirms that Appraisily maintains auction-record context under his public artist page. It does not, however, supply item-level descriptions, condition information, provenance, sale dates, realized prices, or enough evidence to characterize particular bodies of work. Market assessment should therefore rely on the documentation attached to the specific object and on genuinely comparable public sales whose attribution and work characteristics can be checked. Identity deserves particular care because collected authority records describe Portway differently as South African and British. No price forecast, market trend, scarcity claim, or premium for a particular subject or technique is supported by this source pack.

## Appraisily data basis

Appraisily artist pages combine researched identity records with auction-house context, sale dates, realized prices, and comparable lots when those records are available. This profile distinguishes confirmed authority data from details that still require work-level evidence.

## Sources

- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21455095
- VIAF: https://viaf.org/viaf/20486606/
- Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/douglas-portway-1793
- Getty Vocabulary Program: https://vocab.getty.edu/page/ulan/500006390
- Appraisily: https://appraisily.com/artist/douglas-portway/