For a king’s ransom
COLLECTING: Check out that old chess set... it could be worth a fortune. John Vincent reports
S a child I lacked the patience to learn how to play chess and the plastic and wood set an aunt gave me for my sixth birthday was consigned to the toy cupboard, never to be used. A few swots played the game at school but in 1972 it received a global boost with the famous Cold War world championship between American Bobby Fischer and Russian Boris Spassky.
Its popularity has been growing ever since, with some 605 million adults regularly locked in cerebral combat.
It is not surprising, then, that a small but dedicated band of collectors, almost all of them serious chess players, pursue the finest sets. The best are stupendously expensive, with a rare 1870 German carved ivory “owls versus mice” set making £150,000 at the £850,000 Christie’s sale of Dr Jean-Claude Cholet’s collection in 2007.
Antique sets of marble, ivory, ebony, gold, silver, bone, amber, onyx, limewood, sandalwood and fruitwood are highly prized, with Indian specimens depicting elephants always popular, along with those recalling historical events and characters, such as the Crusades, Charlemagne, the British Raj and the Battle of Waterloo.
Even a single chess piece can be worth a fortune. In 2000, a dealer snapped up an early Islamic ivory chessman representing the king, made in Egypt or Syria in the 10th or 11th century, for under £1,000 at a Midlands auction... then saw it fetch a staggering £828,750 at Christie’s, 30 times its estimate, a few months later.
Discerning collectors at the top end of the market are moving away from ivory towards amber and silver and this partly accounts for the growing popularity of work by Regency silversmith Edward Farrell, one of whose sets from 1816 realised $92,500 at Christie’s, New York, in 2012, while in London a mid-19th century chess table by Birmingham silversmiths Elkington and Co fetched nearly £2m in 2014.
Not all sets are so costly and at Christie’s in South Kensington, London, a Russian or Spanish bone “pulpit” set, 19th century, fetched £3,750; Regency turned ivory