MARKET NEWS
Tate Britain announced last week it had acquired William Stott of Oldham’s atmospheric late-19th-century masterpiece
The Ferryman. It has been a long process. Fifteen years ago, Robert Upstone, a curator at Tate, tried to buy it for the museum. In 2015, after he had left Tate for the Fine Art Society, he became the seller on behalf of the owner, taking it to the Maastricht art and antiques fair TEFAF, where he priced it at £2.2million. After some negotiation, Upstone finally settled a price of £1.8million for Tate with funds provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Hintze Family Charitable Foundation and the Art Fund.
Prints from the estate of a little-known artist’s widow proved to be the best sellers at the London Original Print Fair, which closed on Sunday. Thirty-five linocuts and wood engravings dating from 1935 to 1986 by William Thomas Rawlinson, an art teacher and official war artist who died in 1993, were sold by Elizabeth Harvey-lee. Priced from £150 to £750 each, many were rare, sometimes unique impressions.
Italian early-renaissance maiolica (or painted pottery) was once the holy grail of the maiolica market, but fell out of fashion in the mid-20th century. Interest has, however, been revived by Sam Fogg, a London dealer in medieval and Islamic art, who has spent five years assembling 43 examples from around the world, which are now on display in his Mayfair gallery. Although several pieces have had to be put back together (maiolica is
A maiolica dish featuring a young man from Deruta, Italy, c.1470-80 notoriously fragile), it is remarkable how many are still in good condition. Prices for the gloriously designed, hand-coloured pots and plates go from £10,000 to £100,000.
An unprecedented number of plaster moulded (as opposed to bronze cast) sculptures by Alberto Giacometti go on view at Tate Modern this week (see review, opposite). All 75 are lent by the Giacometti Foundation, which has recently restored them. One of the donors to the restoration costs is London dealer Thomas Gibson, who has been showing Giacometti’s work since the Seventies. Gibson believes the plasters have a different definition from the bronzes and should be worth as much, if not more. “The problem is that collectors think they will break,” he says. Of the 100 most expensive Giacometti sculptures to sell at auction, only four are plasters, and come in at the lower end, from £1.5million to £3million. Gibson suggests that the tide will change in the plaster market. He has mounted an exhibition of rarely seen works by Giacometti to coincide with the Tate show in which there is one plaster, a bust of the artist’s brother, Diego in a Sweater, which is priced “upward of $10million (£7.7 million)”.
The sale of the collection of the late publisher and philanthropist George Weidenfeld at Christie’s this week shows how fond of high-ranking clergy the late publishing magnate was – especially popes. But the pope painting he hung with most pride, by Francis Bacon, is not among the works for sale. Although visitors to his home believed it was his, sadly for Christie’s, he’d only borrowed it.