Nov 22, 2021
I was delighted to read that auctions have been providing a little light in the darkness recently.
Among all the gloomy articles about impending disaster arriving from one corner or another was the latest news from the Office for National Statistics, which reveal that auction houses and clothes shoppers have made a significant contribution to the recovery of retail sales in October. Economists had expected an uptick of 0.5%, but these two sectors helped that rise to 0.8%
That may seem small beer, but when you’re looking at an economy worth trillions, this is actually a very important piece of news in boosting confidence.
So why have auctions become so important? As discussed in this column more than once, they were already set up to handle the pandemic well, with sophisticated, user-friendly systems for bidding online. With many people sitting at home finally having the time to test this out, auctions attracted a whole new audience of bidders, while existing clients also found more time to take part in this convenient method of acquiring goods.
Not only that, the experience of bidding online is entertaining and exciting too, so who wouldn’t want to give it a go. I envy anybody who enjoys the thrill of that first successful bid at auction.
I would argue that it’s also the key to attracting the next generation of buyers, who are already sold into the idea of trading in second-hand goods as they recycle clothes, shoes and tech.
Auctions have already succeeded for millennia; now they are proving just how adaptable they remain.
Nov 14, 2021
In my view, one of the most under-priced areas of the fine art and collectables market is Victorian watercolours. Some artists’ work can fetch a pretty penny, but for the most part landscapes, genre scenes, figural studies and the rest can be had for little more than a hundred pounds or two; sometimes considerably less.
Why is this?
One explanation is that tastes have simply moved on and buyers today can’t relate to the subjects depicted. Another is that people expect their art to ‘perform’ more. A nicely mounted and framed riverside view or idyllic cottage scene may be well executed but perhaps does not leap from the wall in the way a bit of brashly coloured Street art does.
Whatever the reason, it’s hard to believe that the spirit of nature and humanity captured in these views has no place among the collections of the future. I see many of them as a tonic, a perfect means to gently attract the attention of the viewer and make them ponder awhile, stepping off the conveyor belt of modern life to contemplate and drink in the serenity of a time gone by, when life was a simpler – if sometimes tougher – affair.
A plentiful supply of notable compositions comes to auction on a regular basis. Why not see if you can find one you like for the wall. We can all do with an occasional bit of slowing down, and gazing on an accomplished work by one of these masters of times gone by is an effective way of doing that.
Nov 8, 2021
The COP26 summit is yet another reminder of the grim fate that awaits humanity if it does not get its act together on the climate. Gas-guzzling boilers? No more to be sold by 2035. Coal? Out by 2040. Log burners? Forget it.
As with everything that is unhealthy when it comes to food and drink, it seems that there is a conspiracy afoot to take all enjoyment out of life.
So thank goodness for the virtues of antiques. As I have often rehearsed in this column, furniture, silver, works of art and ceramics, among many other well-crafted and delightful treasures, tick every green box that can be thought of when it comes to saving the planet.
As the Antiques Are Green movement advises us: “Invest in the Future, Recycle the Past.”
And what an example this campaign gives us to prove its point, the humble Windsor chair, a thing of beauty and practicality: “The chair parts were made by craftsmen who lived in the woods where the materials came from,” AAG tells us. “The turnings were produced on treadle-operated lathes, then parts were taken on foot to a local workshop to be assembled. From there the completed chairs would be distributed around the country by horse and cart or waterways.”
Some of these chairs are now well into their second century of use and treasured as much now as when they were first made – arguably more so.
“By buying this chair to use again we have conserved our natural resources and prevented the carbon footprint of another chair being produced, that possibly would come all the way from the Far East,” says AAG. On the other hand, a new mass-produced chair will hit the waste tip long before the antique Windsor chair is sold again at auction, goes to the restorers and is revived and retailed again for another 40 years’ use.
Nov 1, 2021
If auctions are about anything, they are about history: making it, celebrating it, retelling stories.
As I have written many times before, objects that raise huge sums at auction often have little intrinsic value in themselves; a masterpiece by Francis Bacon is still no more than a collection of materials – oil paints, canvas and wooden frame – but the creative process, the resulting ‘art’, the proximity to genius and the historic associations that it has make it worth more than its weight in gold.
Ounce for ounce, nothing outside of digital art carries more value than rare stamps. Now one of the rarest – and arguably the most important ever printed – is up for sale.
The first Penny Black went on sale in 1840, revolutionising people’s ability to communicate with each other. Suddenly, anyone could send a letter from one end of the country to the other without the recipient having to pay for a bespoke mail service that excluded all but the wealthy.
The stamp on offer here is attached to what is known as the Wallace document, named after Robert Wallace, who headed up the commission on postal reform. The document is dated April 10, 1840 and the Penny Black became valid postal tender almost four weeks later on May 6.
A simple and inexpensive process coupled with the iconic design of the Queen’s head, Rowland Hill’s ground-breaking concept became a worldwide phenomenon adopted by every country.
Developing the system and service to support that idea was rather more complex, but it is still in place today.
Oct 25, 2021
What have you got on your wall? I thought about this last week when I heard of the sale of artworks that had been hanging on the wall of a Las Vegas hotel. They were not just any old daubs, mind you, but nine pictures and two ceramic artworks by arguably the most important artist of the 20th century: Pablo Picasso.
Hung on the restaurant wall of the Bellagio Hotel, the artworks spanned more than 50 years of Picasso’s career, with the top price among them coming for the 1938 painting Woman in a Red-Orange Beret. Expected to fetch $20m-30m, it sold for a very encouraging $40.5m.
In fact, as a whole the consignment did rather better than hoped, totalling $110m.
That’s quite a wallful.
It reminded me, too, of the first great discovery on the Antiques Roadshow. Back in 1986, a couple in Barnstaple, Devon decided to show a painting that they had owned since 1930 to art expert Peter Nahum, one of the show’s specialists. They hadn’t thought it worth anything but were curious to find out more about it and, anyway, were taking their dog for a walk so thought they might as well drop in on the show which was filming in the town.
It transpired that it was the most important missing work by the Victorian artist Richard Dadd and dated to about 1845 – two years after he had killed his father in a mad frenzy. Titled The Halt in the Desert, it was painted while Dadd was detained in Broadmoor and shows a rather peaceful moonlit scene. The British Museum bought it for a large six-figure sum.
Oct 18, 2021
So now we know: a work of art can be worth far more once you destroy it. Well that’s true if you’re Banksy. Just a few weeks ago I mused on how much his ‘transformed picture’ Love is in the bin – previously Girl with Balloon – might make when it appeared at Sotheby’s on October 14. It had previously sold for £1m in 2018, and the moment the hammer fell, the canvas dropped through a shredder hidden in the bottom of the frame.
Shocking it may have been at the time, but it was a stunt that caught the art market’s attention, fascination and even admiration, turning the picture immediately into Banksy’s most famous / notorious artwork, and so also the most valuable of his paintings.
It remains the greatest irony that the artist who does more than any other to subvert the art market and its processes has proved himself yet again the ultimate master of the industry’s marketing machine.
In this context, while Sotheby’s estimate of £4-6 million might have looked a little punchy, it did not seem beyond the bounds of possibility. So what happened on the night? Forget the estimate; frenzied bidding took the painting to £18.5 million hammer, a record for any piece of Street art, sealing Banksy’s status at the top of the international art pantheon for living artists alongside the likes of David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Beeple and Jeff Koons.
Oct 10, 2021
Paul McCartney has no desire to write an autobiography, I understand. However, a new broadcast interview does provide further insights into the endlessly fascinating subject of The Beatles. Despite the long-held view that it was Macca who pulled the plug on the Fab Four – the result of his announcement during an interview at the beginning of the 1970s – he now reveals that all he was doing was finally letting slip what had been decided some time before. According to Sir Paul, it was John Lennon who called time on the band as he sought pastures new with Yoko Ono. The other bandmates, including McCartney, had wanted to carry on.
Setting the record straight provides some of the most newsworthy stories, and auctions are often the catalyst for this.
The latest example is the decision by Al Capone’s descendants to consign 174 personal items for auction. Ageing themselves, his grandchildren wish to divest themselves of these important artefacts, firstly so at least some of them can go to public institutions, secondly because they are concerned about wildfires near their homes and thirdly because it creates an opportunity for revising the public opinion of Chicago’s most notorious gangster.
A letter from Capone, written to his son while languishing in Alcatraz, shows his touching human side, argues his granddaughter. “These are not the words or ideas of a man who is a ruthless gangster. These are the words of a loving father,” she told The Guardian.
Maybe, but sadism and sentimentality in the same person are not mutually exclusive, as many a tyrant has shown. Capone may have been cuddly with some, but the Roaring Twenties Capo had a public reputation that was richly deserved.
Oct 5, 2021
What price a rickety old wooden bridge stretched across a small stream in a wood in the south east of England?
Around £60,000 if the auction estimate is accurate.
Surely you could buy a much better new one for a fraction of that sum?
Ah yes, but not one associated with such a dearly loved character as Winnie the Pooh – and certainly not one that could claim to be home to the legendary game of Pooh Sticks.
First described in A.A. Milne’s The House At Pooh Corner, the bridge could be found in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex, near the author’s home.
Milne’s son, the model for Christopher Robin, played on it as a boy, as have generations of children since.
After countless thousands of had tramped across it, it was replaced with an iron bridge in 1999; now, 114 years after it was first constructed, the bridge has come up for auction.
So how to put a price on something so simply made and with such little intrinsic value, but whose associations catapult it into the collectables stratosphere?
Certainly, £60,000 for something so iconic does not appear unreasonable, but if a rich enough fan comes up against someone equally determined to secure it on the day, bidding could rise far beyond that figure.
The best way to price such an item is to look at other auction prices for major pieces linked to Milne and Pooh. The original Hundred Acre Wood map illustrated by E.H. Shepard sold for £430,000 in 2018, which makes the bridge’s estimate look a bit of a bargain.
Sep 27, 2021
From Georgian times until the past 20 years or so, Country House Sales were a relatively frequent occurrence. We all loved them because they offered the perfect mix of fabulous pieces across the board with a wonderful provenance. For those selling, a single auction or series of auction provided them with catalogues of the events that could be kept as family mementos. For buyers, it was the chance to nose around a grand home and perhaps pick up something decent that had the gloss and glamour of aristocratic connections.
These sales were relatively commonplace between the end of the Second World War and the late 1960s, when homes that had been turned over to the military were restored to those who could no longer afford to keep or renovate them.
In recent years, such sales have been rarer, although we were delighted to host one in June at Selham House.
Now, however, what promises to be the ‘Country House’ sale of the decade has been announced: in fact it is the sale of the contents of eight homes, all belonging to the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who died in 2019.
Although his personal style was one of restrained flamboyance, limiting himself to black and white in his own dress, Lagerfeld’s lavish tastes found magnificent expression in his homes.
From traditional sets of porcelain and antique sculpture to the most contemporary of modern art, the designer’s possessions seem to have no limit. In true country house fashion, items for sale cross a very wide expanse, from furniture and elaborate works of art to handbags, glassware and clothing.
Goodness knows how much money all this will take, but the auctioneers should make a pretty penny simply from selling copies of the catalogues, which will immediately become collectors’ pieces themselves.
Sep 20, 2021
Although auctions date back millennia, they not only remain relevant today as a way of conducting business, but as up to date as ever.
The Romans settled the throny issue of the Empire’s succession by literally lotting it up in its entirety and selling it off to the highest bidder. The lucky winner was Marcus Didius Julianus, who won the prize in AD 133. Luck soon turned against him, though, when the Senate condemned him nine weeks later after his rival – and successor – Severus got the upper hand.
From antique furniture to NFTs, fine art and collectables have always found a happy home at auction. In recent years, as technology has widened its scope considerably, the auction process has been applied to everything from imports confiscated by customs to nuclear power stations.
As an auctioneer myself, I have always been committed to the process, but I have often wondered who else is, so in the past few days I checked by using a simple Google search.
Here are a few of the things I found being offered at auction: a First Class Seat (not a ticket for it but the seat itself) from an aeroplane; a guest role in the TV series Doc Martin; an abandoned chateau in the South of France (sold for just €205,000!); the Porsche used by Tom Cruise in the film Risky Business ($1.8m!); and a First Edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (over $1m!).
My favourite article, though, was an opinion column on whether cricket teams should scrap the toss at the beginning of matches because it gave too much of an advantage to the winner. Instead, it suggested, teams should bid against each other, awarding each other runs for the privilege of choosing who should bat first. The highest offer would effectively win ‘the toss’.
