GREAT EXHIBITION HOLDS IVORY KEY FOR AN UPRIGHT PIANO AT £21,000

The piano featured today would not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it was chased away to a 10-times estimate £21,000 when it appeared at Piano Auctions in Bedford in April. In a way it reminded me of my own piano. Formerly my great granny’s, it is a model by Ralph Allison of London retailed by Patterson’s of Perth. It has a stunning burr walnut case and dates to 1888.

It was formerly tuned by an elderly chap in Dundee. On his first visit he quietly mentioned it was the oldest upright he serviced. He added it was upright strung with overhead dampers and required old-fashioned tools to fit the square tuning pegs. I was hugely impressed by this and asked if this made the piano a good one. “No,” he replied, rather too emphatically for my liking.

Anyway, one of 139 pianos to find new homes in the Bedford sale was a c1850 Erard upright piano in a mass of extraordinary Gothic carving.

This was Erard’s Elizabethan New Patent Grand Oblique Pianoforte. It had a heavily carved walnut case with a pierced gilt metal gallery above fretwork panels, flanked by Elizabethan character figures, and it was profusely decorated with geometric and floral ornament.

This model was exhibited at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851. Due to the enormous effort by British firms and industries to submit only the finest work to the event, anything associated with the most famous exhibition on British soil always carries a premium.

This would have helped to put the piano on a different scale, so to speak, and probably pushed it to its multiple estimate £21,000.

The Erard piano sold in Bedford.