Western Morning News (Saturday)
Historic watch in sock drawer
FRANK RUHRMUND looks at an upcoming exhibition of Rebecca Polyblank, who celebrates the sights and sounds of wild nature
A17TH century watch in the form of a cross, given as a confirmation present, has been discovered in a sock drawer by Charterhouse Auctioneers in Sherborne and valued at £20,000.
“Usually when we are working in client properties we just find socks in sock drawers so I was shocked to come across a little box with this amazing watch,” commented Richard Bromell. “Of museum quality it is phenomenal find which if we had not looked carefully it could have inadvertently been thrown away after the owner passed away.”
The watch was clearly treasured and loved, having no doubt been hidden away in the drawer of a remote Dorset cottage for safety.
Dating to the mid-17th century the cruciform watch, made from brass in a rock crystal case and decorated with enamel, measures just 8cm high. The dial has a chapter ring with Roman numerals which is centred by the birth of Jesus above a vignette of Adam and Eve. The back plate, engraved scrolling foliage, is signed Drovino A Potiers. Generally it has survived the past 380 years in good condition, although it has lost its hand and the case is chipped.
Found in a little cardboard box with a pencil inscription “Lorna’s watch-clock Confirmation Present from me” it is thought by the family to have been a present from her parents some 80 years ago or so.
Entered into the Charterhouse two day online auction on Thursday 11th & Friday 12th March it is estimated to sell for £20,000.
Charterhouse are now accepting entries for their busy programme of auctions including audio equipment, coins, medals, stamps, clocks and collector’s items in this two day March sale, pictures, books, Asian Art and sporting items in April, classic & vintage cars in April and classic & vintage motorcycles in May.
Items for these auctions can be posted directly to Charterhouse at The Long Street Salerooms, Sherborne, call 01935 812277 or click and deliver by contacting them on 01935 812277. Alternatively email photographs of lots for valuation on info@ charterhouse-auction.com
‘Usually when we are working in client properties we just find socks in sock drawers so I was shocked to come across a little box with this amazing watch’
There can’t be many areas in this country, let alone the county, that possess as much evidence of their prehistory as Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor does. The Ordnance Survey map shows so many sites – from tumuli and hut circles to standing stones and quoits – that during its early years, from about 3000BC onwards – stone to iron age man – it must have been a busy place.
The author Frank Baker, in his book The Call of Cornwall, published in 1976, said that while regretting some of the changes that had already been made, he felt that, “at Siblyback Moor you would still be in the wild land of Daniel Gumb, the remarkable solitary who made a home for himself out of the stones he found and there brought up a family in defiance of all authority. His authority lay in the stars, if you find any stone chiselled with mathematical diagrams, or any kind of you cannot interpret, it is likely that old Dan Gumb has made himself known to you, that lonely patriarch who sought the true way and probably found it.”
He certainly found, as Frank Baker did, “the cotton plant, the curlew, the peat, the lichen, the copper streams, the buzzard, the otter, the thin creeping dodder, and the stones that move and stand still and move again and sing to the wind music that Daniel Gumb heard.”
Something of that same Music for Those Who Listen can be heard in the exhibition of that name by the Bodmin Moor-based painter and sculptor Rebecca Polyblank which opens the 2021 exhibition scene at the New Craftsman gallery, St Ives on Saturday, March 6.
An artist who celebrates the sights and sounds of wild nature that can delight our senses if we only take time to notice them, although born in Plymouth, Rebecca Polyblank grew up on both sides of the Tamar, first in
Fowey, then near Tavistock. She began her artistic career as a student at Plymouth College of Art & Design where she was taught by the well-known Penwith painter Alex Mackenzie, and then studied sculpture at Gloucestershire College of Art & Technology in Cheltenham where, in the early 1980s, she gained a first class honours degree.
Since then, she has exhibited widely, and for several years was a regular exhibitor with the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery in Kent and Yorkshire.
In 1987 she returned to the Westcountry, and has since exhibited often in Cornwall and Devon as well at other UK venues.
The winner in 2000 of the Black Swan painting prize in Frome, Somerset, she now lives and works on a smallholding with her husband and two children –not
forgetting a flock of sheep and her dogs – in a remote part of Bodmin Moor with a view from her studio of Carne Down.
Rebecca said: “I find inspiration from my immediate local area and its ever changing seasons.
“Walking the moors most days in different weathers reveals an atmosphere and sense of history in its ancient rocks and textural fields. The colours, temperatures, and the light, also play their part.
“I’ll bring back to the studio specimens of flora and fauna to study and draw in detail and then to include in paintings. I use acrylic paint, drawing ink and pencil on paper. The lines and drawings are important to the pictures where all the marks play an essential part.”
Just as her paintings delight so, too, do her sculptures. Although only papier mache, her creatures, from owls and deer to hares and moor ponies, appear to carry all the weight of stone, granite to blue elvan, and the texture of works in bronze.
Together, both her paintings and sculptures are special. I can’t help feeling that both the late Frank Baker and Daniel Gumb, with their passion for Bodmin Moor, would have loved them.
Rebecca Polyblank’s exhibition Music for Those Who Listen is at the New Craftsman Gallery, 24 Fore Street, St Ives. March 6-27. For details see: www.newcraftsmanstives.com