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Why the Glorious Twelfth means Thorburn to me
This is an area of pheasant shoots, and while those ready to take aim will have to wait until October 1 for that, August 12 was the start of the Red Grouse season.
While blasting birds out of the sky has never been my passion, the paintings of game birds by Archibald Thorburn (1860-1935) are. His depictions of pheasant, grouse and ptarmigan are pre-eminent among British bird painters of the past century, as prices at auction will confirm. A decent watercolour of any of these birds in a moorland setting will have no problem encouraging bids up to the £25,000 mark.
Collectors have long taken aim at Thorburn but I suppose he really came into his own when the popularity of shooting spread from the landed gentry to commercial shoots in the 1980s. Born the son of a miniaturist painter who worked for Queen Victoria near Edinburgh in 1860, Thorburn had little to no formal training except for a brief stint at art school in St John’s Wood. What really set him on the road to his life’s work was a stroke of luck. In 1887 when the Dutch artist J.G. Keulemans fell ill, Thorburn took over the commission from Lord Lilford of Northampton to complete the illustrations for the seven-volume Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands. By the time he finished his career had taken flight. He even designed the first Christmas card for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), of which he became a Vice President.
The son of Robert Thorburn (1818-85), portrait miniaturist to Queen Victoria, Archibald was a Scottish artist with an obvious yearning for the unequalled grouse moors of The Highlands, but nonetheless spent the second half of his life in Surrey.
He moved to Hascombe, not far from our Fernhurst rooms, after his marriage in 1902, and his grave can be found at St John the Baptist church in Busbridge near Godalming.
Victorian values have all that it takes to attract a modern taste
It never ceases to amaze me how what are, frankly, in my opinion a series of unattractive daubs flung together in the name of Contemporary art can make millions at auction when highly accomplished and rather beautiful Victorian landscapes can be had for buttons.
I suppose that fashions change and, with them, tastes. Don’t get me wrong, I think a great deal of Modern and Contemporary art has a lot to offer, but it is also rife with mountebanks. However, the flipside of what has been a rather subdued market for late Victorian and Edwardian painting is that you can pick up stunning art for very little indeed.
Just browsing through one of the online auction platforms the other day, I worked out that, with a fair wind behind me, I could fill a whole wall with stunning Victorian and Edwardian watercolours for less than £2000. Some of the pictures looked a bit tired, but closer inspection revealed that they simply needed a new mount and frame, and at these prices this was very much a realistic option.
I have also seen some evidence of prices recovering for rather better examples of the period, and, of course, outstanding artists like our own much-heralded local talent, Helen Allingham (1848-1926), have always done well.
Tastes may change but a devotion to their craft, with a painterly approach and sensitive treatment of subject matter, means that the potential for Victorian and Edwardian artists will always be there.
I have no idea whether art like this will enjoy a renaissance in years to come – although it certainly deserves to – but those cherry picking now will be in the best position to capitalise if it does. And if prices remain in the doldrums, well they will have a fantastic selection of art gracing their walls, which they will never tire of.
Successful art and antiques businesses must work out how to appeal to younger buyers
One of the great obsessions in our industry is how you attract the next generation of buyers and sellers. Forty or fifty years ago, newly married couples tended to go to auction to buy furniture and decorations for their first home. Then the era of mass consumerism, with its disposable, flatpack furnishings, took over, tastes changed, and the local general weekly auction started to look like a thing of the past.
Well, half a century on we’re still here and as relevant today as we have always been. Yes, we have had to adapt, offering more specialist sales, better catalogues, clear costings and, in the advanced technological age, live bidding via the internet.
What hasn’t changed are the twin thrills of finding something special hidden among the day-to-day items and the charged atmosphere of competitive bidding and ultimate victory as the hammer comes down. I’d say they are as attractive characteristics of the auction process for the young as they are for the more mature among us. However, by themselves, they are not enough to sustain a healthy level of business going forward. As auctioneers, we must make sure that the new generation feels as well-informed and comfortable with the process as its predecessors. In modern parlance, it’s known as building a trusted brand.
Dealers face similar challenges. I was chatting to one last week about his recent experiences standing at antiques fairs. When times are uncertain or tough, he said, he adapts the stock he presents on his stand so that it appeals to richer, older people who are less likely to be affected by fluctuating financial fortunes.
However, what he really wants for long-term success are new, younger buyers who are setting off along the road to a life of collecting. They may spend less in the short term, but they will be around longer, graduating to more valuable pieces as life goes on.
The other challenge for both him and auctioneers like me is the changing nature of buyers. When I started in the business, most people who bought at auction were dealers who would turn up every week to restock and spend a reasonable sum. Now more private buyers are raising a hand or clicking a mouse to bid – and very welcome they are too. However, fewer take the form of traditional collectors looking to see what’s on offer, week in, week out. A far greater percentage are those wanting something to decorate their house with, which means they tend to be one-off purchasers. This means we must all be much more proactive than ever before to make a success of this business.
Olympic records at auction – getting in the mood for the Paris Games in July
The Paris Olympic Games start on July 26, and as we build up to the excitement, I am reminded of some of the exceptional prices achieved for collectables linked to this global sporting event.
When the Games were revived in 1896 – the first of modern times – winners received silver medals, with runners-up getting bronze and nothing for third place. One of those silver winner’s medals came up for sale in January this year at RR Auction of Boston where it took $112,000, although RR sold another in 2021 for $180,000.
However, the real money is reserved for the rarest of Olympic torches. In 2015 a Helsinki 1952 Olympic Games torch sold for £420,000 at auction. In this case, the torch was one of three – along with the first torch, introduced at the summer games in Berlin in 1936, and the first winter games torch, from Oslo in 1952 – needed to complete a collection.
The price beat the record set by another Helsinki 1952 torch, which had sold for €290,000 in Paris in early 2011.
The reason the Helsinki torch is so treasured is that very few were made – only 22, in fact, 15 of them with hallmarked silver bowls. To put that in context, London’s 2012 Games produced 8,000 torches, and as many as 15,000 were produced for the Sochi 2014 Winter Games.
That £420,000 is certainly a high price, but only the third highest in terms of Olympic collectables.
The price of £450,000 was paid for a silver cup given to Spyros Louis, who won the marathon at the first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896. The winning bid was placed in London in April 2012, just before the capital’s own Games were held – showing just how important timing can be for auctions.
Out in front at a massive $1.47m, though, is one of the four gold medals won by Jesse Owens, perhaps the most famous Olympian of all time, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Owens won his medals for the 100m, 200m, 400m relay and Long Jump, but it was what he represented above and beyond these feats that have made him such an icon. His triumphs were a direct challenge to Hitler’s belief in the supremacy of the Aryan race, and Owens rubbed his face in it at the very Olympics that Hitler staged to prove his point. Good for him!
