Victorian sculptures cast a spell at sale
It may be one of the least fancied areas of the art market, but Victorian sculpture came top at Sotheby’s last week. After 142 years, in the face of crippling rent rises, The Fine Art Society had moved out of its premises in New Bond Street, and was holding a clear-out sale. The auction saw works by modern British stalwarts such as Ivon Hitchens and Gluck hum over the £100,000 mark, but topping the bill were casts of Eros (1893) by Alfred Gilbert (Piccadilly Circus) and Peter Pan (1911) by George Frampton (Kensington Gardens).
Their presence at auction prompted at least one American tourist to bemoan the sad state of the British economy, if we are having to sell such landmarks. These were not the originals, however, having been recast from the original moulds in 1987. The gallery made several casts and sold all but the two that were in the auction. Competition was therefore hot for the British icons – Eros selling for a double estimate £262,000, and Peter Pan for a triple estimate £346,000 – both far above their 1987 prices and records for the artists.
The gallery is now looking for new premises and has little stock to worry about, since a large proportion of it had already been destroyed in a warehouse fire in Battersea in 2016. Happily, the gallery’s Edinburgh branch is staying put.
A panoramic view of a fashionable crowd attending a private view at the Royal Academy in 1881 by the eminent Victorian painter William Powell Frith (he who painted
The Derby Day) has just gone on sale for a knockout £10million, or thereabouts. The 6.5ft-long painting includes lifelike depictions of Oscar Wilde, prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, painter John Everett Millais and actress Lily Langtry.
It was bought in 1883 by the brewer Alfred Pope, and has remained with his descendants ever since. It was hung last week in the small gallery of Victorian art specialist Martin Beisly, behind Christie’s in St James’s.
Although no Frith painting has sold for more than £505,000 at auction, Beisly compares this particular one to high-priced Victorian classics such as Millais’s portrait of John Ruskin, valued at £7million when acquired by the Ashmolean in 2013; Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen, valued in 2017 at £10million but bought by the National Gallery of Scotland for a reduced £4million; and Sir Edward Burne-jones’s Love
Among the Ruins, which in 2013 fetched £14.8million at auction.