Beautiful George III bureau to star in furniture sale
IT’S COMPLETE WITH NOT ONE BUT TWO SECRET DRAWERS
ON Tuesday March 17, 1998, John Taylors staged what is, to date, the most successful auction ever seen in the saleroom. The contents of the home of the late Miss Diana Dixon of Grimsby’s Dixon Paper Mill family sold for a quarter of a million pounds.
One painting, a Venetian canal scene by Federico Del Campo, sold for £94,000.
Some wonderful period furniture sold for thousands as bidding soared way over expectations, taking pieces way beyond the limits of many collectors.
A reminder of this famous sale arrived in the rooms a few weeks ago when one of the best collections of period furniture that we’ve seen for quite some time was sent for inclusion in our auction on Tuesday, April 16. Tucked away in a drawer was the Dixon Auction catalogue, the result of every lot marked up in ballpoint by a Lincolnshire farmer who had clearly been in present for the whole sale. As far as we’re aware he did not buy anything in that auction but he did acquire an impressive collection over the years and it is that which will be going under the hammer.
It includes some beautiful pieces but as readers may be aware the market for period furniture is off the boil and values are very much lower than they were a quarter of a century ago. The star pieces in the collection include a stunning George III mahogany bureau dating from the 1790s, a country house quality piece, complete with not one but two secret drawers. (Sadly empty!)
Back in the 1990s this would have sold for two or three thousand pounds. Now it might make just two or three hundred. Equally impressive is a Regency sideboard, a mahogany, boxwoodstringed, tour-de-force, complete with a cellarette drawer for the wines and retaining the brass curtain rails that were the fashion back in the early 19th century. Again we’re looking at a value in the hundreds, rather than the thousands. And there’s more. Of course every cloud has a silver lining. For fans of period furniture there simply has never been a better time to bag a treasure. Meanwhile harking back to the Dixon auction, a painting provided the highlight of the day and while our April auction does not have a Del Campo, it does have a really good picture section – including two paintings by Louis Bosworth Hurt (1856 to 1929), an English landscape painter today best known for his paintings of the Scottish Highlands, often featuring native cattle. His work regularly makes it into four figures at auction and does on occasion make it into five figures, so these are interesting entries.
Finally a brief mention of one or two other noteworthy entries in the sale. The watches include an Omega Seamaster 300 expected to make £2,000, 2,000, a Cartier ladies watch that should attract interest and the most valuable entry in the jewellery is an 18 carat white gold diamond ring, the central stone .6 of a carat and a total diamond weight of 1.19 carats, estimated at £1,000 to £1,500.
The catalogue is available at www.johntaylors. com with viewing sessions at the Eastgate Saleroom are on Sunday and Monday, April 14, and 15, 1pm to 3pm.
The auction starts at 10am on Tuesday, 16.