Rings of power
Memories and mourning are encapsulated in a selection of gold rings, as a gallery moves and Leonardo’s followers are acknowledged
AS I write, the online sale of the late publisher Naim Attallah’s ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ has still almost two weeks to run at Sotheby’s. In the first few days, many lots attracted holding bids of £1. This tactic enables a bidder to get into the fray more quickly when the action heats up. There is already evidence of more serious interest in a few items, notably a painting of sleeping tigers by William Huggins (1820–84), which is estimated to £15,000 and has a bid of £8,000. Walking sticks, vintage crocodile-skin luggage and two lots of antique rings are also already in play.
One lot of six gold rings includes at least one memento mori (estimated to £2,000; £1,000 bid), and the other seven carved hardstone gold rings, including a St George and an Anubis (to £3,000, £2,000 bid). Mourning rings always find collectors and, as the Paris and New York dealer Les Enluminures puts it, ‘cameos and intaglios have never gone out of fashion’.
Recently, a sale of jewellery and watches at Lawrences of Crewkerne offered no fewer than 43 lots of mourning rings from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Together, they made about three times the expected total. The oldest was the most expensive: a gold ring with the image of a skull and inscription ‘Behold thy End’, which was dateable to about 1620 and sold for £10,400 (Fig 4). It was unnamed and so, presumably, a general memento mori rather than a mourning ring for an individual.
Many others had initials or names and dates of death. One such was a gold and black-enamel mourning ring for M. Pyrke, who died aged 76 on December 22, 1738 (Fig 2). This can be amplified. She was Mary Pyrke, a daughter of Sir Duncombe Colchester (1630–94), a mayor of and MP for Gloucester. It is said that ‘after a life of debauchery, he was persuaded by his son to repent and compose a solemn confession to be read in local parish churches “as a warning to all”’. I trust that my son will not happen on this. Mary married Nathaniel
Pyrke of Abenhall and Mitcheldean, Gloucestershire, who left her a widow in 1715. Her handsome ring sold for £4,940 (estimate £600).
According to the catalogue, a white enamel ring containing hair, which had the motto ‘Regardez et Souvenez’ and an inscription to ‘R Warbarton Allen’, was Victorian (Fig 3). Estimated to £400, it sold for £1,690. I wonder whether it might not have been a little earlier and the middle name ‘Warburton’. If so, it perhaps memorialised the otherwise obscure son of Ralph Allen (1694–1764). Known as ‘The Man of Bath’, from Allen’s quarries came the stone of which the city, and his own Prior Park, were built.
His literary friends and protegés included Pope, Fielding (he was the model for Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones) and the controversialist William Warburton, for whom he obtained the bishopric of Gloucester.
An unusual ring that reached £1,170 had a locket compartment for hair surrounded by half pearls (Fig 1). This swiveled to reveal a black enamel plaque inscribed ‘Mark Hodgson, Esq died 12 July 1810 aged 52’. There is more to be said of this gentleman, too. He inherited a brewery at Bromleyby-bow, Middlesex, and Hodgson’s India Ale made him a fortune, despite (in the words of a competitor) ‘its thick and muddy appearance and rank, bitter flavour’. His son was a long-serving
MP for Barnstaple, where during elections ‘he dispensed his bounties from his ample purse with a profusion that has seldom been exceeded’.
Returning to the living, one might hope that the travails of the past two years have persuaded more people that art is to be lived with rather than merely accounted an asset or investment. If one is to be locked up at home with only one’s own pictures and furnishings to look at, then—unless one is a Silas Marner or Scrooge—they should be things that give aesthetic or intellectual pleasure.
That is what makes Jenna Burlingham’s new premises in Kingsclere, Hampshire, so right for the times. The Rope House is a handsome 18th-century building just along George Street from the previous gallery opened in 2010, but there is more space (Fig 6). As the name implies, it was a rope-maker’s home (it was also formerly an Italian restaurant) and, although there are open galleries on the ground floor, it is presented as a comfortable townhouse, and the upper rooms offer relaxed domesticity. This is the perfect way to present her
Modern British and other 20th-century paintings, prints, ceramics and sculpture, together with contemporary work that continues the traditions. The opening show, to November 30, includes work by Ivon Hitchens (Fig 5), Winifred Nicholson, Mary Potter, William Nicholson,
Keith Vaughan, Prunella Clough, John Piper, Ben Nicholson, Bryan Wynter, William Scott and Patrick Heron, with contemporaries such as Martin Yeoman, Nicholas Turner, Keith Purser, Sam Lock, Richard Fox and Emma Maiden.
Next week Here and there