It’s hard times for the Victorians
Last week’s sales proved the period is still in a dip – pictures of glamorous women excepted
Values in Victorian art have generally been downgraded since fashion swung to the modern. At Sotheby’s Victorian sale last week, for example, two paintings of toga-clad women by Aesthetic movement artist Albert Moore, which sold to a Japanese buyer in the 1989/90 boom for £62,000 and £91,000, found no takers even at £24,000 each.
But the sale had its moments. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s more seductive watercolour of a languorous, redhaired beauty, Lady Lilith, which went to Japan in 1988 for £115,000, saw a better return, selling for £680,500.
Pre-raphaelites are generally outperforming the rest of the Victorian market, as are pictures of attractive women. The anonymous UK buyer of Lady Lilith went on to outbid art adviser Wentworth Beaumont – with a double estimate £187,500 bid for a drawing of another of Rossetti’s pouting “stunners” – and pay a record £90,000 for a watercolour of an alluring sea nymph by Arthur Hopkins, the brother of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Most competition at the sale came for The Weary Moon, a symbolistic watercolour of a curled-up female nude drenched in silver and gold in a star-studded sky by Edward Robert Hughes, the not too well-known nephew of the Pre-raphaelite artist Arthur Hughes. The painting was last sold in 1989 for £9,000. Last week, it attracted the attention of collector Isabel Goldsmith, daughter of the late Sir James Goldsmith, who chased it from the £30,000 estimate until it was hers for £115,000.
At Christie’s, Rod Stewart’s collection of mostly dowdy damsels all sold but not to the kind of rapturous reception he is used to on stage, the presence of souvenir hunters excepted.
His star lot, John William Waterhouse’s romantic rendition of Boccaccio’s tale of Isabella and the Pot of Basil, for instance, was knocked down below its optimistic £1million estimate. The unexpected ace in his hand was a heart-wrenchingly beautiful Ophelia by minor French artist Jean-baptiste Bertrand, which quadrupled estimates to sell for £97,500.
These two sales, which included works from British Impressionists, were dominated by British buyers, but Edward Seago’s normally popular windswept Suffolk views and French ports, favourites with the Royal Family and professional classes in Britain, were underperforming, as were lovable dog paintings by Alfred Munnings, Briton Rivière and John Emms.
Are these signs that middle England is feeling a post-brexit pinch?