Be our guest
Victorian paintings offer tempting tableware and one of the oldest lots ever to come to auction goes under the hammer
Last week, I mentioned a splendid silver punchbowl that would help to lighten the winter’s gloom. this week, I have the chance to discuss my favourite wine glasses, which would accompany it very happily. I have been collecting lemon-squeezer rummers for a long time and, as prices have naturally risen over the years, it is as well for me that the set of eight that I noticed recently is actually in a painting rather than on a dealer’s shelf.
Lemon-squeezers were produced, so far as I know, only in Britain, where, towards the end of the 18th century, the term ‘rummer’ took over from goblet for short-stemmed wine glasses. some say that it derives from rum punch, but that’s unconvincing; more likely, it is a borrowing from Dutch and German, where roemers were large glasses for drinking healths.
the feature that gives these rummers their particular name is the ribbed hollow under the heavy square foot. they seem to have been fashionable between about 1790 and 1820, thus perfect Regency. My feeling is that the earliest bowls were trumpetlike, whereas, later, they became more fully rounded. some bowls have fluting and others are delicately engraved. there are also larger and smaller versions, presumably used for celery and salt.
anyone tempted to seek them out (and for my own sake, I hope that not too many of you are) should be aware that similar glasses were produced during the neo-georgian 1920s. However, those tend to be flimsier, with thinner feet, sometimes even without the lemon-squeezer, and the glass has a whitish look.
My prompt for writing about them now is a painting sold by sotheby’s in its last Victorian auction of the year, which went very encouragingly. the 1920s neo-georgian fashion followed on several decades during which reproduction 18th-century furniture and nostalgic paintings of Regency scenes had been in vogue. One reason for this was that the spread of the railways had made commuting practical and the owners of the new houses that were suburbanising much of the Home Counties wanted reminders of a rural past of stagecoaches and picturesque peasant cottages.
although Birket Foster and Helen allingham supplied the latter, Walter Dendy sadler (1854–1923) was one of the best of the Regency nostalgics. surrey-born, with two artist brothers and a sister, Kate, who was a fine flower painter, he was technically very accomplished. It is ironic that it should have been the Pre-raphaelite art critic F. G. stephens who pointed out that his great strength in portraying
details could become a weakness when overdone.
To my eye, detail was definitely a strength in the 50in by 38in The
Skipper’s Birthday (Fig 1), which made £18,750 at Sotheby’s. I loved the salts (both around and on the table), the willow-pattern plates, the knives, the cheese cradle—with an Oude Amsterdam perhaps, but its smaller section empty of biscuits as there was that enviable crusty loaf—the pipe rack and, above all, the lemon-squeezers (Fig 2). In real life, such a set of eight might cost about £1,500.
As Stephens further noted, Sadler was also brilliant at conveying character in what could so easily have been stock figures, and these old seafarers are fine examples. One thing that puzzles me among the furnishings is the string of gourd-like objects hanging by the fireplace. Perhaps a reader will enlighten me.
Harold and Laura Knight were born just 20 and 23 years after Sadler, yet how different an art world they inhabited. It may be that early-20th-century ladies’ fashions worn by their models represented a nod to the loose dresses of the Regency after the intervening decades of crinolines and bustles, but the Knights’ sunny plein-air Edwardian Impressionism had little to do with Sadler’s storytelling.
Even when Harold Knight painted an interior with a girl reading a newspaper at breakfast, he gives us just that—an instant, not an indication of a whole life.
Laura Knight’s art evolved further than her husband’s in her post-first World War gipsy and circus subjects, but one thing that she never changed was her hairstyle, retaining tight Arts-and-crafts braids over the ears throughout her life.
Her glorious red hair can seldom have shone to greater effect than in Harold’s 1926 head-andshoulders portrait that made £87,500 against a £15,000 estimate at Sotheby’s (Fig 3). The Knights retained the 16in by 121∕2in canvas for more than a decade before relinquishing it to an American collector, whose descendants were the vendors.
I wonder how long it took Mr N. D. Derbyshire to collect about 50 pieces of Baltic amber containing insects (Fig 4). The cataloguing for his late-19th-century display case at Summers Place Auctions near Billingshurst was educational, at least after a second reading: ‘A common misconception is that amber is made of tree sap. Sap is the fluid that circulates through a plant’s vascular system, while resin is the semi-solid amorphous organic substance secreted in pockets and canals through epithelial cells of the tree.’
Approximately 44 million years old, this must constitute one of the oldest lots ever to come to auction. Complete with the collector’s notes and a picture of himself and his wife, it reached £7,250, which seems modest somehow.