The bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo is celebrated in two rather different ways by the art market this week and next.
In Edinburgh, Lyon & Turnbull has put together a small, balanced sale of paintings, letters, bronzes, medals and swords from both the British and French sides for those who follow in the footsteps of Lord Byron, JMW Turner and Sir Walter Scott as collectors of Waterloo memorabilia.
In London, Dover Street dealers Robilant and Voena side firmly with the French, by looking at the way Napoleon defined the art and fashion of his empire through artists, architects and designers, expropriating the neo-classical style.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a striking portrait of the emperor in his coronation robes by Baron Gerard, and his studio assistants, and is priced at £750,000. A 12-and-ahalf-feet wide tapestry by Le Corbusier that was commissioned for the Royal Opera House in Sydney in 1958 but never delivered has at last found its way there, having been discovered in an auction in Copenhagen last week. The Opera House spotted it at Bruun Rasmussen’s sale, where its exact original purpose was unknown. It had an estimate of £69,000.
Rather than telegraph its interest, the Opera House employed the discreet services of the Londonbased advisor William Iselin, an authority on European decorative arts, who advised them on condition, authenticity and value, and then bid for them.
Iselin clearly encountered some competition, as the tapestry sold for £204,000, a record for a Le Corbusier design in any medium. London’s first summer sales of Modern British art took place last week and demonstrated a very solid market with a few surprises thrown in. One was the very bullish prices at Sotheby’s for the recently deceased Scottish sculptor William Turnbull.
Turnbull’s six-and-a-half feet “Lotus Totem’’, made with rosewood and bronze, had last sold in 1990 for £9,000, but interest in his work has escalated lately and, after strong bidding by the Pyms Gallery in London, it soared over its £120,000 estimate to sell to an overseas collector for a record £701,000.
A small bronze head by Turnbull tripled estimates to sell to the same buyer for £112,500. Standing an impressive four-and-a-half metres high, Robert Delaunay’s 1925 painting of the Eiffel Tower is sure to stand out as one of the highlights of Masterpiece, the high-end art and antiques fair that opens in London next week.
Discovered by London dealers Dickinson in a collection where it had been since the death of the artist’s widow, Sonia Delaunay (herself the subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern), it is one of several paintings Delaunay made of the tower.
This one was made for the International Decorative Arts exhibition in 1925 and carries a host of landmark Parisian references, including the aeroplane that was flown through the Arc de Triomphe during the 1919 victory parade.
Stylistically it bridges the Cubism and Orphism of 15 years earlier with the new Art Deco, and is priced in the region of $5 million (£3.2 million).