Art Market
Sometimes fiction and fact blend seamlessly and a collection sheds new light on war
IN a later essay, Umberto Eco related how the protagonist of The Name of the Rose, Brother William of Baskerville, had taken on a life independent of his creator. In the medieval whodunit, the fictional monk travelled from Rome to Avignon in the train of a historical cardinal and, as the beginning and end dates of the real journey are known, the book’s action had a tight timeframe. Eco had been contacted by a reader who had come across an account of a festivity at another point on the cardinal’s progress and, logically, William must have ‘been’ there, too—unknown to Eco.
A pair of pistols in Thomas Del Mar’s December sale (Fig 2) produced a slightly similar hallucinatory feeling of fiction coming to life. In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Rawdon Crawley, the betrayed husband of Becky Sharp, is determined to fight Lord Steyne, but the Marquess, despite having earlier declared ‘One or other of us must not sur vive the outrage of last night’, buys him off to avoid the duel. Had the 3rd Marquess of Hertford, who was Thackeray’s real-life model for Steyne, accepted such a challenge, he might have used these silver-mounted 30-bore duelling pistols.
They were made by John Manton of London in 1790–1, with fine mounts by Michael Barnett, probably for the 2nd Marquess, from whom they passed to his son, the 3rd, and grandson, whose widow founded what became the Wallace Collection.
The cased pistols did not enter the collection, but were
sold off at some point. A later owner was Maj Hugh Bertie Campbell Pollard (1888–1966), an incompetent British intelligence officer during the Irish War of Independence and, in 1936, one of a group of rightwingers who flew Gen Franco from the Canaries to Morocco to launch the Spanish Civil War. He was also an authority on modern and ancient firearms; among his works were The Book of the Pistol and Revolver (1917) and The Sportsman’s Cookery Book.
His fellow Franco supporter Douglas Jerrold said that he ‘looked and behaved like a German Crown Prince and had a habit of letting off revolvers in any office he happened to visit’.
In 1922, Pollard sold these pistols for £30. In 1993, they made £32,200 at Christie’s and now they have reached £64,400 with Del Mar at the Blythe Road auction hub.
Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–97) is best known for his
chiaroscuro paintings inspired by the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment and for his involvement with the Midlands group known as the Lunar Society. For most of his career, he was based in his native Derby, but the painting that headed Sotheby’s evening Old Master sale in December,
An Academy by Lamplight (Fig 1), owed more to the politics of the London art world than to Midlands intellectual activities.
It is very likely that this painting —there is a second version in the Mellon Collection at Yale—is the one he exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1769. That was the year after the acrimonious split in the Society that spawned the Royal Academy, and the now rival bodies had each set up their drawing schools. The Academy Schools were formal and disciplined by the dictates of Joshua Reynolds; at the Society, classes were more egalitarian in the manner of Thornhill and Hogarth’s St Martin’s Lane Academy. Wright had remained with the Society and this can be seen as an advertisement for it. He had not yet visited Italy and so could not have seen the 1st-century AD statue known as the Borghese Nymph with a Shell (now in the Louvre), but probably knew the copy by Scheemakers that had been in England since the 1730s.
The costs of running classes, including salaries for professors of anatomy and chemistry, hastened the decline and collapse of the Society. Many members made their peace with the Academy, but Wright was never happy with it, despite being elected an Associate.
The 50in by 40in painting was believed to be one of the last of Wright’s major works in private hands, having been with the Crossley family, Lords Somerleyton, since the mid 19th century and it sold for £7,263,700.
The annual December wineand-spirit sale at Cheffins in Cambridge was led by a bottle of 80-year-old Macallan whisky, which reached £3,048 (Fig 3), but more interesting from an artistic point of view were two other lots of Macallan, which each sold for £559.
They contained 10-year-old whisky, so presumably distilled in 1987, as they were boxed with miniatures of the Private
Eye bottling in celebration of the magazine’s 35th anniversary in 1997. The labels were by Ralph Steadman and, according to the box blurb, the miniatures were then worth £6.95. How much was a full bottle of Macallan in 1997?