Conditions of sale
Buyer confidence is boosted by full descriptions of items for sale and some intriguing family connections are revealed
NOT for the first time, I would like to commend Cheffins of Cambridge for its custom of giving concise condition reports in the catalogue entries for fine-art sales. It boosts confidence and, now that so many more people will be tempted by the internet to buy without viewing, it is increasingly important.
Cheffins’ two-day sale in June did very well and there can be no doubt that the condition reports added to the prices.
The very first lot was a case in point. It was a Staffordshire pottery pocket-watch stand, possibly made by Obadiah Sherratt in about 1810, catalogued as ‘modelled as a classical portico, the top mounted with a pineapple, the arched cresting moulded with radiating leaves, all supported on four pillars, the “marbled” stepped base mounted with a recumbent lion, 11in high’ (Fig 3).
Then we were told: ‘The pineapple has chips around the edge —small chip at the back—the watch support at the back has the majority of the frame missing— tiny areas of enamel loss to the back spotting—very small chip to the bottom right hand corner at the back.’ In recognition of these imperfections, the estimate was set at up to £500, but the stand was bid to £3,302.
The buyer of a mourning ring (Fig 6) at £2,310, almost 10 times the estimate, probably knew the identity of Isabella Curwen or perhaps those of the HCW, SJW and RBW whose monograms appeared on a mourning pendant sold together with it. I can’t help with the monograms, but Isabella was a member of a most interesting Cumbrian family: the Curwens of Workington Hall. They were descended from
a pre-conquest Anglo-danish thane who managed to integrate them into the new Norman establishment. Consequently, they held Workington from the reign of Edward the Confessor to that of George V.
Later generations included Jacobites and MPS and they had a number of other estates across Cumbria and north Lancashire. Isabella married Henry, the last of the male line, and was the daughter of William Gale, a merchant in the American trade, who built the oldest surviving house in Whitehaven and whose brother was step-grandfather to George Washington.
As the ring tells us, Isabella died on December 12, 1776. On Henry’s death in 1790, their only daughter, Isabel, inherited the hall and her husband, John Christian, added the name Curwen to his own. He came from a leading Manx family, whose most famous member was Fletcher Christian. Thus, by a matrimonial quirk, this ring links the leader of the Bounty mutineers to the chief of the American rebellion.
The ring was designed as a diamond-set black-enamel urn —one diamond was missing— with a twist of hair behind and the accompanying pendant, which dated from the early 19th century, also contained locks of hair.
The sale was boosted by two major consignments, one of 18thand 19th-century watercolours and paintings of Devonshire and the other of stock from the now closed architectural salvage business Crowther’s of Chiswick.
The collector of the Devon views was unnamed and the provenance for them was given as ‘Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge’. Among the early watercolours were Townes and White Abbots and a group of eight views around Plymouth by William Payne.
Payne (1760–1830) is an interesting figure. He began as a draughtsman in the Drawing Room at the Tower of London, one of the best available train-
ings for a topographer, and spent six years as a military surveyor working on the defences of Plymouth. Later, he became a very successful drawing master, largely because he perfected a style that was easily communicated.
As was then customary, he painted over a grey ground, but turned this to advantage by marketing his own Payne’s Grey. It is still on colour charts.
His first exhibits at the Royal Academy, in 1786, included a Penny Cross Chapel, near Plymouth. Also in that year, he began to produce circular compositions, so it’s possible that the ‘Ennismore Gardens’ Penny Cross Church, Devon (Fig 1) is that exhibit, although I think it’s unlikely, because, at 45⁄8in diameter, it would not have been noticed. It had, however, been exhibited at the Fine Arts Society in 1946 and it was unfaded, so, at Cheffins, it set a record for Payne, selling for £8,255 against an upper estimate of £400.
I don’t believe the two lots of drawings by John Nixon (1755– 1818)—his birthdate is now established—were from the same collection, although two were Devonian. Nixon has a strong place in my affections as he was the subject of my first article in this magazine and I catalogued the collection that brought him back to public notice.
He was a very good amateur caricaturist and landscape sketcher
and a friend of Rowlandson, with whom he sometimes toured. They were at Lynton, Devon, together in 1811, perhaps drawn back by Nixon’s memory of a visit in 1785, which had produced one of the drawings on sale, the 5in by 81⁄2in View from the Inn at Lynton with Mr Locke’s House and Grounds in the bottom (Fig 2).
Together with A view at
Rottingdean, it made £1,651. A sheet of pen studies of characters on the quay at Plymouth made £254.
The principal watercolour by Francis Towne (1740–1816) in the collection, the 77⁄8in by 61⁄4in A Lane in the Village of Wonford, near Heavitree,
Exeter, sold for £10,795 (Fig 4). Although they had left Devon for London, Heavitree was where the artist and his wife chose to be buried.
Prominent among the Crowther lots was a late-18th-century marble chimneypiece, which measured 56in between the jambs and doubled the estimate to take £20,320 (Fig 5). Fittingly for a principal fireplace in a home, the frieze was carved with Vestal Virgins, who tended the sacred flame of Vesta, goddess of the hearth.
Next week Things are not what they seem in Dorset
Nixon was the subject of my first article in this magazine