London Eye: December 2009

While the recession has had a negative impact on the top of the art market, with the bigger fine art auction houses suffering significantly reduced consignments to their blue-chip sales, elsewhere it seems to have had a positive effect. British provincial auction houses have been busy emphasizing their green credentials, promoting local auction sales as recycling opportunities that offer an attractive alternative to buying new.

Another strategy adopted by provincial firms has been to prioritize specialist sales over general dispersals. Salisbury auctioneers Woolley & Wallis are among a small number of UK provincial auction houses who have formed a series of specialist departments with sound expertise in each. As a result they operate more like local versions of Sotheby’s or Christie’s than general auctioneers. This may be the reason why their Asian art offerings, for example, continue to turn up fine and rare objects such as the Yuan dynasty double-gourd vase that made a record hammer price of £2.6 million ($4.6m) at their July 2005 sale.

Their latest Asian art offering on Nov. 11 didn’t quite scale those vertiginous heights, but it did feature a most unusual small 18th-century Chinese famille rose “abstinence plaque.”

This tiny rectangular object, measuring just 2 inches long, was decorated to each side with stylized flowers on a lime green ground and with the Chinese and Manchu characters meaning “to fast.” One hesitates to call this a Chinese chastity belt, but that is essentially the measure of it. We are reliably informed by Woolley & Wallis’s department of ancient Chinese social history that these objects were worn by ladies and consorts of the court as an indication that the wearer was abstaining, during times of ritual impurity, from food or drink, but also to warn off their husbands or lovers during a period of chastity. What price chastity, then? On this occasion £6,500 ($10,500).

Further evidence of Woolley & Wallis’s ability to attract objects from far and wide came when an Australian collector chose to consign a very rare Martin Brothers bird into the firm’s November sale of decorative arts, where it was estimated at £30,000-£40,000. Sadly, although a superb example of its type, this rare bird failed to get airborn, perhaps weighed down by an over-optimistic forecast. Compensation came in the form of another Martin Brothers “Wally” bird provenanced to the Jordan Volpe collection, which drew a respectable hammer price of £9,000 ($14,600).

A similar business approach to that adopted by Woolley & Wallis has long been in action at Dreweatts in Donnington Priory near Newbury. The firm has steadily built up what is arguably the first regional auction house “chain” since the heyday of Phillips’ multiple branches in the 1980s and early ’90s.

Dreweatts’ last sale in November featured a richly varied collection of objects amassed by one John Copplestone Luther Fane, a descendant of the Earls of Westmorland. When the family seat in Oxfordshire was sold to the Getty family in 1985, many of the Fane family objects were removed from the house and it was these that Dreweatts had the privilege of offering.

There is always a certain poignancy to the occasion when a titled family disperses its heritage. Once functional objects become unmoored from their family connection they seem to lose some significant part of their identity. That did not seem to be a factor in the bidding at Dreweatts, however, where £24,000 ($39,000) changed hands for an important silver tureen by George Wickes, whom Dreweatts reliably inform us was one of England’s finest silversmiths during the early 18th century.

The Fane family’s country seat also had connections with the English revolution, including a portrait of Adrian Scrope, a prominent Parliamentarian who signed the death warrant of Charles I. Even more notable was a pair of postillion’s boots, reputedly once worn by Oliver Cromwell. Today, it is only at grand country houses that one is likely to encounter a pair of postillion’s boots — those huge, reinforced leg protectors worn to prevent a horseman being crushed between horses. This pair realised £3,800 ($6,100).

Among the more noteworthy pictures was a fine Italianate landscape cataloged as Circle of Poussin, which coaxed £22,000 ($35,800), and a portrait of Henry Fane, a prominent member of the Fane family, by Thomas Gainsborough, which also realised £22,000 ($35,800).

Before moving on to other matters, a brief note about one or two other newsworthy results from the provincial auction circuit this month. Duke’s, the Dorchester auctioneers, sit in an enviable catchment area that combines old money, country lifestyle and traditional taste. This, together with the depth of expertise gained over many years by auctioneer Guy Schwinge and his able team, frequently attracts superb objects under the hammer. The firm’s late November sale included an interesting “Soho” tapestry panel in the manner of John Vanderbank, worked with Oriental figures in a landscape. Just what a fine example this was of the English taste for exotic Oriental subjects was made clear when the hammer fell at £9,000 ($14,600) against an estimate of £3,000-£6,000.

Duke’s sales are always cornucopias that seem to embrace objects from every conceivable style, period and material. If the Vanderbank tapestry panel exemplified the most exacting standards in tapestry weaving of its day, arguably the same was true of the furniture made by Cotswolds Arts and Crafts cabinetmaker Sidney Barnsley. An oak Cotswolds School dresser by Barnsley, the upper section with an open cross-beam back over a slightly bow-front base, and the whole displaying a wealth of typical Barnsley details — chamfered edges, paneled doors and exposed dovetails — realized £9,500 ($15,500).

Meanwhile, up in Driffield in East Yorkshire, Dee, Atkinson & Harrison found themselves with a house record for their fine art department thanks to a fine oil on canvas by Frederick William Elwell (1870-1958), entitled Motherhood. This appealing and highly commercial genre picture, showing an interior with a mother and her maid bathing three small children beside a fire, swept aside an estimate of £15,000-£20,000 to bring £25,500 ($41,600). It is exactly 100 years since the picture was first exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Finally, looking ahead to early 2010, a bespoke antiques weekend has been scheduled to take place at the Macdonald Kilhey Court Hotel in Standish, Lancaster, Jan. 15-17. Located within an hour’s driving distance of both Liverpool and Manchester, the Kilhey Court Hotel and spa has excellent leisure club facilities. Those attractions, alongside an eclectic offering of antiques and collectibles, promises to make the weekend a fine opportunity for trade buyers to mix business with pleasure.

Having chilled out in Lancashire, there will still be plenty of time to head south in time for the Winter Decorative Antiques & Textiles Fair at the Marquee in Battersea Park, Jan. 19-24. This fair takes place three times a year and has become the most attractive of all the London antiques fairs largely because it has succeeded in throwing off the straitjacket of snobbery and string quartets that make most other fairs seem so hopelessly out of pace with the modern world. The Battersea fair is much about visual flair, about emphasizing the decorative and unusual in interior design by encouraging us to combining the ancient and the contemporary, the rustic and the urban in funky new combinations. The theme of this year’s event is Pagodas and Pavilions: Eastern Influences on British Design, so one can expect plenty of exotic chinoiserie and japanning.

Will 2010 be the year that the art and antiques trade emerges from recession? Confidence is certainly returning and there is already a lot more optimism and activity than 12 months ago. Fingers crossed.

 

Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and journalist. His monograph on British sculptor Sean Henry has just been published by Scala.