Art market
A lucky association with the collector Joe Setton continues right up to a successful posthumous dispersal sale
HOW serendipitous it was for Julian Hartnoll when, in 1968, shortly after he had opened his first St James’s gallery (in partnership with Giles Eyre), a man walked in with a copy of Percy Bates’s 1899 book English Pre-raphaelite Painters, Their Associates and Successors. The man was Joe Setton, who wished to collect every artist illustrated in the book. Victorian art was crawling back into fashion after decades of derision and already, thanks largely to dealer Jeremy Maas, the original Pre-raphaelites were being collected, but second- and third-generation followers— their ‘associates and successors’ —were appreciated more on the Continent than in Britain.
Good things could be found very cheaply, but this was irrelevant. As Mr Hartnoll puts it, Setton, who was born in Alexandria in 1916, was rich enough from his businesses, especially building powerboats for fellow millionaires, to be able to fund his collecting ‘from his back pocket’. He was also an enthusiast who really enjoyed life—and collecting. Equally, Hartnoll enjoyed acting for him.
Setton died in 1984, but only last month was the collection dispersed, in a sale organised by Christie’s with Mr Hartnoll. Once again, the luck of timing was with him. For a few interlockdown days, physical viewing was possible and there was little else on display, so the collection was shown to advantage in the larger rooms, rather than being squeezed in corners during what would traditionally have been one of the busiest weeks of the season. The past year has shown that, given high-quality online presentation and confidence in auctioneers or dealers, collectors are willing to buy remotely and scour the web to find what they want. Chinese bidders were doing this already; what is unexpected is that they seem to have developed an enthusiasm for Victorian painting—buyers here included a number from eastern Asia.
There were 34 lots on offer. Six were bought in, but almost all the others went over estimate, in many cases spectacularly so. Women were strongly represented among the second and third pre-raphaelite generations and in the collection—another example of luck in timing. It is also worth remarking that half the sold lots went to female buyers.
Recently, Christie’s announced that it would no longer allow external access to its archives. In the muniment room were held marked-up day books going back to the beginnings of the business in 1766; paintings, in particular, could be tracked through stock numbers. When
I was on the reception counter there, it was part of the job to undertake ‘look-ups’ for the public, as well as museums and institutions, thus providing history, provenance and sometimes proof of attribution. This service cost the firm little and was a valuable national, indeed international, resource. It is regrettable when a business puts internal considerations before the wider good and it’s to be hoped that, as technology has made the business of look-ups simpler, normal service may be resumed.
I was prompted into this diversion by seeing in the catalogue that the first Setton lot, The Light shineth in the Darkness
by Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919), was bought at Sotheby’s Belgravia in 1972, but no price was given.
At that time, De Morgan’s husband’s lustreware ceramics were already in demand, but I doubt
whether her own very considerable artistic merit was widely recognised. Now, it certainly is. During the past couple of years, several of her paintings, drawings and, as here, hybrid pictures have been making splashes on the market. This 25in by 17½in work was in pencil, black chalk and gold on black paper, a combination she used to great effect throughout her career, especially for Spiritualist or Biblical subjects. Against a £50,000 estimate, it sold for £162,500.
A 1907 Christie’s price of 25gns —about £1,040 today—was provided for De Morgan’s Gloria in Excelsis (Fig 2), a neorenaissance oil painting that now sold for £622,500 against a £350,000 estimate.
An auction record was set not only for Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927), but for any of the Pre-raphaelite Sisterhood with the £874,500 (after an estimate of £500,000) paid for her 30½in by 39¾in water-and-bodycolour
chef d’oeuvre (I’m trying to avoid the word ‘masterpiece’),
The Enchanted Garden (Fig 3).
The story depicted is an unusually moral one for Boccaccio’s
Decameron: a happily married beauty agrees to her would-be lover’s propositions only if he can conjure up a blossoming garden in midwinter. He employs a necromancer to do so, she regrets her foolish promise, he releases her from it.
Spartali Stillman was a member of one of the Anglo-greek families that were so influential as patrons and muses for British art in the second half of the 19th century. She was a pupil of Madox Brown, had a long, successful career and, in 1871, married an American diplomat and journalist, whose fluctuating
earnings she bolstered by her painting. This 1889 work is regarded as one of her best.
Another female artist to do well was Alice Macallan Swan (1864–1939), who is mostly remembered (if at all) as a floral still-life painter. Here, she offered a more ambitious 15in by 11in water and bodycolour of a richly dressed young woman trying a ring from her jewellery box. It sold for £15,000 against a £6,000 estimate.
The serenity of the 48in by 64in Sleeping Beauty (Fig 4) by Archibald Wakley (1873– 1906) makes a stark contrast to the premature end of the artist’s career—hammered to death in his Westbourne Grove studio in west London, probably by a Horse Guard he was entertaining. It is a remarkable painting and made £400,000 against a £150,000 estimate).
Next week Time to cheer