An explorer’s globe-trotting collection sets sail
The late Richard Kelton was a passionate yachtsman and explorer. He spent nearly 50 years sailing to all corners of the Pacific Ocean from his seaside Californian home and amassed more than 5,000 works of art relating to the history and culture of those regions.
Kelton, whose family business was in real estate, died earlier this year aged 90, and Christie’s was tasked with valuing his collection. Last week, it sold three 18th-century views of Tahiti (the earliest on record) by William Hodges, Captain Cook’s official expedition artist, for £1.2million. One made a record £659,250.
On Thursday, the Kelton collection will provide Christie’s with the first-ever auction devoted to “China Trade” paintings. The term describes a genre of paintings made by Cantonese artists in the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly of south Chinese trading ports, as decorative souvenirs for expat collectors. Prices for the 114 lots will range from £300 to £80,000.
Next week, in New York, Christie’s is selling about 50 paintings, sculptures and prints by Paul Gauguin that Kelton began acquiring in the mid-eighties, as a spin-off from his interest in Captain Cook. “He became obsessed with Gauguin,” says his son, Mark, whose family still owns a further 100 by the French post-impressionst artist – a handful are currently on loan to the National Gallery exhibition of Gauguin portraits.
Although Kelton never indulged in Gauguin’s multi-million-dollar Tahitian paintings, one of the paintings in the forthcoming sale did cost him $1million. The other works are prints, three-dimensional stoneware or ceramic works and posthumously cast bronzes that range from $6,000 (£4,645) to $60,000. The prints, says Richard Lloyd, Christie’s head of prints and multiples, range from rare unique impressions made in Tahiti to largereditioned works that were made by Gauguin’s son, Pola.
Indeed, the current auctions are just the tip of an iceberg: the Kelton Foundation owns 1,500 China Trade paintings and objects. “He was building a reference collection,” says Nicholas Lambourn, Christie’s topographical pictures specialist. “He wasn’t just after masterpieces; he wanted to give a comprehensive history.”
So, what are the prospects for Kelton’s lifelong labour of love? When he was buying China Trade pictures, in the Eighties and Nineties, it was primarily an American buyers’ market. But since the 2008-09 crash, the Americans have been in retreat.
Conversely, China Trade paintings were formerly looked down on by the Chinese (because they catered to foreigners) but, according to Lambourn, have recently been attracting mainland Chinese interest. Two private museums featuring China Trade pictures have opened in China in the past five years.
In addition, Martyn Gregory, the
London dealer, who specialises in China Trade pictures, is taking an exhibition to the Hong Kong Maritime Museum this week, where he believes local demand will carry the day.
Gregory remembers selling to Kelton in the Eighties, but the collector’s art adventure started even earlier. In 1979, he went on a trip to Australia, where he began buying the Aboriginal bark carvings and dot paintings known as “dreamings”, before they became heavily commercialised. “He was curious about everything,” recalls his son. “He would take us to the desert as kids and collect geologically interesting rocks and then find out about them.”
Kelton kept the pieces he acquired in six apartments, “and would spend days without sleep, researching subjects in his library of 8,000 books,” says Mark. “He read all of them, and there are notes in the margins to prove it.”
Kelton’s fascination with Aboriginal art led to his acquiring 1,500 examples, making it one of the largest outside Australia. What will happen to this has not yet been decided, given the peaks and troughs of the market. Now, Mark is watching to see if it is on the rebound – and it might well be.
This year, the powerful Gagosian gallery in New York held an exhibition including works from actor Steve Martin’s collection and, next month, Sotheby’s is to stage its first New York sale devoted to Aboriginal art. The current Christie’s sales, therefore, are unlikely to be the last the market will hear about the Kelton collection.