CAMBRIDGE, U.K. – While the Dundee-born painter Catherine Read (1723-78) is considered the first Scottish woman to work as a professional artist, a close second was Ann Forbes (1745-1834). Born in Inveresk, East Lothian, the granddaughter of the portrait painter William Aikman (1682-1731), Forbes demonstrated remarkable talent and determination to further her artistic education in Italy at a time when female artists were excluded from the training given to male students. Tutored in Rome by the ex-pat Scottish artists Gavin Hamilton and James Nevay, she returned home in 1771 as a competent oil painter and opened a short-lived portrait studio in the cut-and-thrust of Georgian London. Poor health forced her back to Edinburgh, but she recovered and made a living in the city as a drawing teacher and a portraitist.
Forbes’ likeness is best known through a 1781 painting by her friend David Allen (1744-1796) that hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. She is shown in an embroidered white shawl working at the easel, her gaze turned away from the viewer in steely determination.
The 21 by 18in (52 by 41cm) Forbes self-portrait offered by Cheffins as part of a two-day sale on September 20-21 showed the artist in a similar guise. Worked in the artist’s favorite medium of pastels on paper, she is again shown holding portfolio and the porte-crayon favored by many Georgian artists.
Former owners of this picture included the eminent British rower and Olympian Frederick Pitman (1892-1963) and the British journalist and Reuters manager Sir Christopher Chancellor (1904-89). However, at a moment when women artists of all eras are being reassessed, its commercial value has probably never been higher. Estimated at £800-£1,200, it hammered at £8,500 (£10,580, or $12,700 including buyer’s premium).
LONDON – Bonhams’ London Jewels sale on September 21 was topped by a Chaumet diamond necklace that hammered for £240,000 (£304,800, or $368,200 with buyer’s premium) against an estimate of £120,000-£150,000.
Made around 1900, the striking design was conceived in 1896 when the firm was commissioned to make a tiara for the Archduchess Maria Dorothea of Austria (1867-1932) for her wedding to Philippe, Duke of Orleans. The first version, noted for having ‘inverted arches interspersed with laurel-leaf elements supporting large diamonds in tapered openwork mounts,’ was convertible to a necklace. Such was the design’s popularity that several slightly different versions were made. This is one of them, and a rare survivor.
Mounted in silver and gold and signed Chaumet Paris, it includes old brilliant- and table-cut, cushion- and pear-shaped diamonds with a total weight of approximately 32 carats.
Other jewels were made by Chaumet incorporating similar ‘floating laurel leaves.’ At the 1900 Paris Exposition, the jury noted M. Chaumet’s technical mastery and how his elegant jewels were carefully designed to enhance important gemstones.
LONDON – A three-quarter length portrait by Mason Chamberlin (1727-87) of the London merchant Joseph Nash (d. 1782) was the most eagerly contested lot at Sotheby’s online sale of Old Masters and 19th Century Paintings that concluded on September 20. Estimated at £8,000-£12,000, it received 32 bids before selling at £32,000 (£40,640, or $49,100, including buyer’s premium).
Although Chamberlin was a founding member of the Royal Academy, and best remembered for his portrait of Benjamin Franklin now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it was the subject matter more than the artist that drove the bidding for this 4ft 2in by 4ft 7in oil on canvas.
Closer inspection of this otherwise workmanlike Georgian portrait shows the subject holding a prominently placed printed pamphlet. From the text just visible on the tattered cover, it is probable that it is a printed version of Memorial Suggesting Motives for the Improvement of the Sugar Colonies. This work, by the proto-abolitionist James Ramsay (1733-89), was an important forerunner calling for an end to the use of slave labor in the West Indies. It was widely circulated among the elite of London in the 1760s before its final publication in 1778.
The Nash family were successful wholesale grocers from Worcester with premises in Cannon Street in the City of London. Joseph’s father William Nash (d. 1775) had been an alderman and a sheriff and was made Lord Mayor of London in 1771.
It is likely that Nash may have come across the work of Ramsay, who was by profession a surgeon, through his father-in-law and fellow merchant John Darker of Gayton (circa 1722–84), the Member of Parliament for Leicester and treasurer of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. The painting was on the market for the first time, having come by descent in the family from the sitter to the present owner.
LOUISVILLE, Colo. – Artemis Gallery’s September 22 sale included a set of finely preserved ancient Egyptian sculptor’s tools: a 4in wooden mallet and a 3in copper chisel. They date from sometime between the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom (the era of Tutankhamun) and the 31st Dynasty, when Egypt became part of the Persian empire.
Mallets of this petite size served a votive purpose rather than as functional tools. It was probably made as an offering to a sculptor or mason of some status or skill.
Very much part of their commercial appeal today is a long provenance that predates the tightening of Egyptian export laws in the 1920s and namechecks some of the best-known museums in the U.S.
Once in the collection of the Egyptologist Émile Brugsch (1842-1930), curator of the Bulaq Museum in Luxor (the precursor of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo’s Tahrir Square), the mallet and chisel were later owned by the banker Anthony J. Drexel (1826-1893) and formed part of the antiquities collection at Drexel University, Philadelphia that was later sold to the Minneapolis Institute of Art (1915-58) and dispersed on the art market in the 1950s.
Since then, as part of the William Benson Harer family collection, it has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1986-91), the University of Arizona Museum of Art, (1993) and the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, San Bernardino (1996-2023).
Estimated at $2,000-$2,500, the lot sold to an internet bidder via LiveAuctioneers for $6,000 ($7,590 including buyer’s premium).
OAKLAND, Calif. – A textbook oil on canvas by the French Impressionist Henry Moret (1856-1913) led the field at Clars Auction Gallery on September 14. The Dutch coastal scene dating to the year 1900 got away at the low end of an estimate of $50,000-$70,000, ultimately achieving $65,500 with the buyer’s premium.
Moret is best known for his involvement in the Pont-Aven artist colony and his richly colored landscapes of Brittany. He enjoyed a particularly fruitful relationship with the influential dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who maintained a number of galleries in Paris, London and New York, and sold an estimated 600 paintings this way.
Moret only infrequently traveled away from Pont-Aven, but a number of his works with a 1900 date depict Holland. Maisons a Volendam, Hollande is a good example of his bold palette choices and forceful and short brushstrokes, a style he credited to Claude Monet.
