A tale of two worlds
Items from a former Gardens Editor of COUNTRY LIFE attract deserved interest, as do pieces from the Paris Ritz, from oils to bathrobes and egg cups
THE popularity of the mid20th-century artists who coalesced around Great Bardfield in the 1930s, and Dedham, both Essex, where Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur LettHaines established the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, continues to grow and Sworders of Stansted Mountfitchet is well placed to exploit it. As recorded here on November 13 last year, Foxgloves, by artistplantsman Morris, took £204,160 against a £30,000–£50,000 estimate. A portion of the proceeds was donated to the Benton End House and Garden Trust, which preserves Morris’s studio and home where the school was based.
The same auction included a first tranche of the contents of Hill House, Sudbury, Suffolk, home of Tony Venison, for many years COUNTRY LIFE’S Gardens Editor, who died soon after the sale. Tony was not only a good friend of Morris and Haines, but also of the author Ronald Blythe, who wrote that he was ‘learned and appreciative, for many years his garden column in COUNTRY LIFE has guided us all’. Many of his paintings and drawings had come directly from the artists. The London dealer who had bought Foxgloves also acquired two of Tony’s Morris paintings, at £12,760 and £22,968.
Last month, further Hill House lots were offered live online by the same auctioneer on behalf of the estate, ranging from a Victorian mahogany hall chair painted with a floral, perhaps armorial, panel (£312) to a 18in by 13½in Morris oil painting, Senegalese Boy (Fig 3), dating from a holiday in Tizi-ouzou, Algeria, in 1921, which reached £10,660. As a catalogue note put it, ‘a slightly disembodied, sculptural quality pervades this work’.
The £5,460 bid for Joan Warburton’s 24in by 20in Succulent on a Chair (Fig 2) was claimed as a record for the artist, who had studied at the East Anglian School. This picture was signed
and dated 1966, but on the reverse was an earlier 20in by 24in still life of a pestle and mortar with a dish of eggs and a wine bottle.
A remarkable £2,730 was paid for an impression of the 6¼in by 5in wood engraving The Dog
Show (Fig 1), 1929, by Tirzah Garwood (1908–51), a Great Bardfield artist with Edward and Charlotte Bawden and her husband, Eric Ravilious. Tony had also acquired artists from beyond East Anglia. Particularly popular were a small 1994 Mary Fedden watercolour The Cut Melon, sold to a London collector at £4,680, and John Craxton’s conté crayon on brown paper Landscape, Lanzarote, 1975, sold to a buyer in Salisbury for £7,800.
The Paris Ritz, as does Tony in a rather different sphere, provides a very desirable provenance. Following the examples of the Plaza Athénée, the Tour d’argent and the Crillon, the hotel had a first successful spring clean and sale from its store cupboards in 2018 and repeated the operation with a three-day June auction this year, again held by Artcurial. All 1,478 lots, amounting to more than 10,000 items, found new homes and the prices were often dramatically above the estimates.
One must wonder if there will be an increase or decrease in guests purloining monogrammed dressing gowns when they learn that a lot of ‘two bathrobes size M, two large bath towels and a smaller towel, in peach-coloured cotton towelling marked with “Ritz Paris”’ (Fig 4), estimated to €400, had sold for €1,950. Peach seemed to be the popular colour, with blue, white, black and beige making less, and the cheapest sets (I think) going for €650.
It took the hotel some years to forgive its ‘liberation’ in August 1944 by the self-aggrandising author Ernest Hemingway—the Germans had departed some time before and he and his followers left a trail of mayhem and a tab for 51 dry martinis. However, Hemingway had been obsessed by the hotel since he first went there with Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s and, in due course, a bar was named for him. Thus, it is unsurprising that a set of six martini glasses engraved ‘Bar Hemingway Ritz Paris’ should make €2,080 against its €400–€600 estimate. Similarly, ashtrays marked ‘Ritz Club’ and estimated to €150 were selling for up to €2,200 a pair (Fig 8).
One might have thought that the two most expensive items, which went to a European collector— or possibly to two collectors— would be thoroughly unfashionable nowadays, even for other grand hotels and restaurants. Perhaps the owner of a superyacht might enjoy the ceremony of being served from the table
à trancher, or carving chariot (Fig 5), which sold for €18,200, even if it was in ‘used condition’ and the hotplate element was faulty. However, it, and the rest of the plate and flatware, was made by Christofle, a business as eminent in Parisian culinary history as the Ritz itself. Founded in 1830, the company introduced electrolytic gilding and silvering in France, as Elkington did in Britain.
Other Christofle prices included €13,000 for a second carving trolley, €11,700 for a Champagne bucket (Fig 6), €11,100 for a fivelight candelabra and €6,500 for 12 butter knives. All of which makes €325 for 12 Limoges Deshoulières porcelain egg cups (Fig
7) seem very cheap indeed.