Cost benefit of the Thatcher factor
Memories of Britain’s political past came flooding back this month with sales from the estates of Harold Wilson (1916-1995), the former Labour prime minister, and his wife, Mary, who died last year aged 102; and of Margaret Thatcher, who died in 2013. The Wilson sale – at Hansons
Auctioneers in Staffordshire – raised £278,000, led by a watercolour of a chateau in Burgundy by the Prince of Wales that sold for what is thought to be an auction record of £12,600. Correspondence that came with the picture indicated that he had given it to Mary in 1995, just after Harold died, and that she sent him a book of her poems in return.
But Labour was outgunned by the Tories when Christie’s sold the third part of Thatcher’s estate for £1.1million. The sleeper was a 1993 portrait of the Iron Lady by Sergei Chepik, the Russian artist, that was estimated at £700 but sold for £40,000.
Although Roy Miles, the art dealer who exhibited Chepik’s work in London, did charge that sort of price for his work privately, nothing by Chepik had previously sold at auction for more than £2,000 – so there was definitely a Thatcher factor at work.
The circumstances of the portrait were not recorded by Christie’s. Perhaps the painting was in thanks for her support of the Soviet Union against the power of a united Germany, after the fall of the Berlin Wall – a support that split her party and contributed to her downfall. She had spoken against the Maastricht Treaty, on which the EU was founded.
Like Lady Churchill, who complained that Graham Sutherland’s 1954 portrait of Sir Winston made him look “gaga”, Thatcher is said to have objected to the withered look of her hands in the Chepik painting, so it is doubtful she ever hung it.
But then, Chepik was an expressionist. Here, he has placed her regally in front of a globe of the world and towering over Big Ben. On her jacket is the Georgian flower brooch that she bought when she won the election to become prime minister. Chepik may have known that the brooch would be worth something one day – in the 2015 Thatcher estate sale, it sold for £158,500 against an estimate of £8,000. Chepik died in 2011, aged 58.