Topographical sales make their final voyage
You could call it “The Last Topographical Picture Show”. At Christie’s London saleroom they have hung 122 historical pictures of places around the world from Asia to Antarctica, Africa to Australasia and from the Americas to the Arctic, together with a row of medals once worn by the great explorer Ernest Shackleton.
Christie’s has been holding regular topographical picture sales since 1968, but this will be its last. Appealing to those who are fascinated by visual records of the age of exploration, trade and empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, past highlights for the department have been The Winkworth Collection of Canadiana, which made £3.5 million in 2015, and nine Chilean and Peruvian oils by Johann Moritz Rugendas, which raised over £4 million in 2016.
Other memorable sales include the Scott and Shackleton Polar Collections, which were sold on behalf of the families of the famous Antarctic explorers, and the coconut that Captain Bligh used to drink from after the Bounty mutineers set him adrift in the Pacific, now at The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
In this week’s sale are haunting paintings of explorers’ vessels abandoned in frozen Arctic waters; views of the Arabian Gulf by Charles Golding Constable, the famous John Constable’s son who sailed with the East India Company.
One reason the Topographical Pictures sales are ending is that they fetch so much less than the Old Master, Modern and Contemporary art sales. Prices at this sale start at £400, and all 123 lots are estimated to bring
£1.9 million at most, or one quarter the price of a single Banksy.
The supply of valuable works is also unpredictable. The sales were only really profitable when they included works by well-known artists like William Hodges, who sailed with Captain Cook to the Pacific, and whose 18th-century view of Matavai Bay in Tahiti sold for a record £659,000 at Christie’s last year, or Charles Frederick Goldie, who painted Maori chieftains with their detailed tattoos in the early 19th century. In 2016, Christie’s sold a Goldie of a chieftainess in a topographical sale for £131,000 – double the estimate.
For most lots it is the location rather than the artist that matters. Here, there could also be some discomfort among new buyers. While of intense interest to historians, some subjects could be considered politically risqué in today’s anti-colonialist climate and the added awareness of our ancestors’ role in facilitating the slave trade.
Several pictures in the Americas section of this sale are set within the context of slavery and the vastly profitable sugar trade – workers loading sugar cane for transport in Trinidad in the early 19th century, or a fortress built by slaves in St Kitts.
Christie’s management was not saying if this was a contributory reason for closing the department or not, but department head Nicholas Lambourn is adamant that the subject matter is not and should not be an issue.
Referring to lot 14, a collection of rare prints of Jamaican life in the early 19th century by local artist Isaac Mendes Belisario, Lambourn says: “You can’t sweep these under the carpet; they are important visual records and should be bought by a museum.”
In his catalogue he quotes a recent academic study, which sees the prints as part of “a transatlantic history that was dominated throughout the 18th and 19th centuries by the actions of the British Empire and by the interests of the sugar industry and the slave trade, but that was also shaped by the complex cultures of the African diaspora and the resistance and agency of the enslaved”.
On the whole, you don’t see images of gross inhumanity in these sales. The record-breaking Rugendas paintings, for instance, were about Brazil, the oldest slave society in the Americas, but depict bustling street markets, far removed from the images of public torture or the hardships of unpaid labour in the fields to create wealth for the colonial economy.
But now both Christie’s and Sotheby’s are focused on higher-end art and luxury goods where the profits and turnover are greater, and cutting back on staff in the face of the pandemic. Lambourn is leaving for the Kent coast, having worked on his first topographical sale there in 1981.
Some will be sad to see the sales go, if nothing else, because of the wellresearched catalogues. Now there will be no more coherently organised sales, collectors will have to search through countless unspecialised auctions for relevant material.
‘You can’t sweep these under the carpet; they should be bought by a museum’