First among equals
Rarity is everything in the auction room and a new year’s selling exhibition offers much to savour
AFTER her November 28 sale, held at Farleigh Court Golf Club in Surrey, Catherine Southon admitted her surprise at the £8,755 achieved by a bronze hand mirror (Fig 1) designed by Réné Lalique in about 1910: ‘I knew that, in perfect condition, they could reach thousands, but this example was in very poor condition. It was very tarnished and worn and the glass itself was cracked.’
It had been estimated at up to £500, so presumably rarity outweighed the damage, which was fully explained by the vendor. He was a dustman and, in 1971, he had picked it up on his rounds, thereafter using it in his locker at the depot.
The mirror was not the only lot in this mixed sale for which damage did not put off the bidders. A 26in-high Ming Dynasty lacquered carved-wood seated figure of Guanyin (Fig 2) sold for £19,456 against an upper estimate of £300. The figure was badly worn and wormed and had a damaged hand. As I mentioned in this column on December 5, Guanyin is the Chinese version of the compassionate Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.
There were no questions about condition for one of the top lots in another Surrey sale held on the same day by John Nicholson of Haslemere. This was a 9¾in by 7½in pastel-andcharcoal study by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson for his Returning to the Trenches (Fig 3) and it sold for £53,750.
It had been catalogued with the authoritative help of Dr Jonathan Black, and Christopher Martin, the art historian who is compiling the Nevinson catalogue raisonné, was in the room to see it sold.
Mr Martin said that the study will certainly be included in his book as it is ‘part of an important cycle of images before [Nevinson] became a war artist, when he was still a Modernist, towards Italian Futurism. This is why there were so many different studies as he was trying to get it right’.
It probably dates from the end of 1914, when Nevinson was serving with the Friends Ambulance Unit, which his father had helped to found. Despite his Quaker upbringing and pacifism, Nevinson was a most combative man, forcing quarrels even on those who admired his art and making difficulties for
himself when he eventually became an Official War Artist. However, my predecessor, Frank Davis, who served on the Western Front from 1914 to the early months of 1918, admired him the most of the artists who painted the rrenches and, as far as I know, never quarrelled with him. One of the first women to be appointed an Official War Artist was Anna Airy (1882–1964). One should not assume that, just because she was not at the front, her work was not sometimes dangerous. For instance, when she was painting A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory, Hackney Marshes—one of her Ministry of Information commissions and now in the Imperial War Museum —the ground became so hot that the shoes were burnt off her feet.
In Richard Green’s ‘50 paintings under £50,000’ exhibition at 147, New Bond Street from January 16, however, she will be represented by a very different side to her art. As early as 1915, the Burlington Magazine had called her ‘the most accomplished artist of which her sex can boast in this country’, and she was a fine portraitist.
The 35in by 30in Young April (Fig 4), painted in about 1934, shows a very pretty girl in a pink dress surrounded by flowers in a sitting room (£28,000).
For 19 years, Airy was president of the Ipswich Art Club, now Society, and, each year, in partnership with the University of Suffolk, it puts on an Anna Airy Awards Exhibition with prizes for paintings or drawings by artists aged from 16 to 20.
In 1968, the first woman and British contemporary to win the Venice Biennale International Painting prize was Bridget Riley, here represented by a 12½in square study (Fig 6) for a stripe painting that became a millennial postage stamp (£48,000).
Her bright palette was inspired by a trip to Egypt and the tombs at Luxor in 1979–80.
At the lower end of the price range, £12,500, there is a good 16in by 21½in Dutch-inspired woodland landscape (Fig 5) by the Norwich School’s James Stark (1794–1859) and, at the upper, £49,500, a 21¾in by 18¼in view over the rainy Place Pigalle, Paris, by Albert André (1869–1954). Next week Mayfair fair