Swan around in style
From Davy Crockett to Mickey Mouse... John Vincent reports on the upcoming sale of an eclectic one-owner collection to suit all tastes.
In all my years of browsing auction catalogues I have rarely come across a multitude of treasures reflecting such fascinating and varied interests as that consigned for sale at Bonhams in London on Wednesday by a man identified merely as an “Important Swiss Collector”.
His haul, assembled over a lifetime, renders the term eclectic inadequate, including, as it does, such diverse artefacts as 2,300-year old glass phallus lucky charms; ancient texts, manuscripts and books; centuries-old books of erotica;
16th century playing cards; early skeleton clocks, cameras and microscopes; clockwork toy cars from the dawn of the motoring age; and even musical automatons and pottery from ancient civilisations.
There’s model steam trains galore, Japanese inro (ornamental boxes), saucy seaside postcards from the 1900s-30s, a working fairground carousel, ladies’ Art Deco evening bags... even an impressive Bavarian sleigh, with a pair of carved mute swans in the driving seat. It was reputedly used by Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886), also known as the Swan King, and is expected to sell for £40,000-£60,000.
The 435-lot collection – which also includes fine art, scientific instruments, silver, carpets and furniture – should fetch hundreds of thousands of pounds and will be sold without reserve, meaning there could be some bargains.
One lot that caught my eye was Davy Crockett’s 1837 Almanack of Wild Sports in the West, the first posthumous edition, featuring a report of the death at the Alamo the previous year of the American folk hero, frontiersman, soldier and politician. The almanack, with a picture of the “King of the Wild Frontier” on the cover, is estimated at £700-£900.
Some of the old clockwork toys on offer are highly sought-after. One car, a Bing de Dion tinplate example from 1907, may go for £3,000-£5,000, while that painted wood and metal children’s fairground carousel, with Mickey Mouse prominent, bears a similar estimate.
A stunning French musical automaton from about 1890 in the form of a
tambourine dancer may go for £2,000£3,000.
As for those glass good luck charms (amulets), all three from the eastern Mediterranean are dated from the 3rd-1st century BC and may fetch up to £2,700 between them.
But what, you may wonder, makes someone collect such disparate objects? The anonymous owner provides a clue in an introduction to the catalogue.
“Beauty, I found, was not the only magnet of fascination. The ‘odd’, the eclectic, and even the paradoxical commanded attention. When I started collecting...there was necessarily no thematic unity or defining biases – rather what spoke to the heart, the intellect, the imagination.”
Now that the time has come to part with the accumulations of a lifetime, he may reflect on philosopher Walter Benjamin’s view on collecting. “Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects,” he wrote. “Not that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.”