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’.
Sep 13, 2021
One of my favourite stories of the past week or so has been about the sale of Napoleon’s trademark bicorn hat. So the story goes, the seller did not know when they bought it that it had once belonged to the great French general and emperor. Only when they had investigated inscriptions on it, its dimensions and, ultimately, hairs found within it, was it confirmed to have been the real deal.
Estimated at £100,000-150,000, it seems a conservative price bearing in mind that other Napoleonic hats have made up to £1 million.
The emergence of the hat at auction set me thinking about what other lost treasures might come to light. Which would I most like to see and what might they be worth?
The list may be endless, but assuming you could verify them as the genuine article, few things would excite potential bidders as much as King John’s Treasure, lost in The Wash just over 800 years ago. A modern-day speculator claims to have found the site where it lies near Sutton Bridge – we shall see. No one is certain of its exact contents, but if it lives up to the legend then it must be worth tens of millions of pounds at least.
Another great loss was the Amber Room, presented to Tsar Peter the Great by the Prussian king Fredrich Wilhelm I in 1716. Looted by the Nazis, it was lost from view until salvage experts recently claimed to have found it in a sunken warship off Poland. Divers, however, said they found nothing.
The ultimate lost treasure? Surely it has to be the legendary Holy Grail, an item that would be utterly priceless.
Sep 6, 2021
What is art? How many times have I heard that question asked? And how many times answered? If anyone ever thinks they have found the definitive response, they would probably make a fortune.
You may think it doesn’t matter, and for the most part it may not. Certainly, some things clearly are art and some things are not. The difficulty is establishing the boundary between the two; a bit like the exact moment you go from being awake to being asleep.
What made me get all philosophical about this was the news that what is arguably now Banksy’s most famous artwork, Love is in the bin – previously Girl with Balloon – was back on the market and expected to make up to $8 million at auction.
It became his most celebrated – or notorious – artwork after it was shredded live during its last sale three years ago. Was it an automated reaction to the hammer falling at just over a million pounds or a remotely controlled process (by someone acting for the artists in the room?)?
Apparently, it was Banksy’s social comment on the art market, which he holds in contempt as he continues to rake in millions from it.
Whether it was a genuine attempt to destroy market value in an expensive painting or not, the controversial incident only added to the work’s allure and price tag. But why? Is it a better picture for being shredded or not? Is its true value found in Banksy’s destructive treatment of it or in his original concept? Should it be seen now as a picture or a piece of performance art?
I’ll leave you to ponder on all that. But what it tells me is that art does not have to be beautiful to be successful.
Aug 30, 2021
With the Polo at Cowdray, the South Downs on the horizon and racing at Goodwood, there’s no doubting we live in horse country, which may explain why equine pictures do so well in our auctions.
Nearly everyone has heard of George Stubbs, recognised as the finest painter of horses in the artistic canon. Other great names among British artists include John Frederick Herring Senior, Alfred Munnings, Cecil Alden and John Skeaping.
Equal talents in this discipline may be found across Europe and further afield. Of the great animal painters, few compare with John James Audubon and his famous and eye-wateringly expensive The Birds of America. However, news of a remarkable set of paintings to be sold in October sheds the spotlight on the remarkable art of Indian painters commissioned to paint animals, birds, plants and architecture by the East India Company in the 18th and 19th centuries.
For a long time, what are known as the Company School paintings were credited to the officials who commissioned them rather than the artists, but the record is now slowly being set straight, first by an exhibition at the Wallace Collection and soon by the auction itself.
My favourite work is a painting of a Great Indian Fruit Bat in full flight. It was painted by an artists called Bhawani Das.
It is heartening to see that the public interest surrounding these works that has arisen from the auction is helping the real artists to get due recognition at last.
Aug 23, 2021
It used to be that someone consigned something for auction, it got a brief description in a catalogue (if there was one), a dealer or private buyer would bid for it successfully and then they would take it away. That was some decades ago.
Nowadays, for auctioneers worth their salt, it’s a much more complex business. Quite apart from all the compliance paperwork, we take much better care of the items consigned, study and catalogue them clearly, make sure they are stored safely and do our best to present them well for the view.
Add to this all the online commitment, from numerous photographs to condition reports, maintaining a website, social media and marketing auctions far and wide – especially now bidders at any sale can come from dozens of countries – and it is easy to see where the time and money goes.
The blessings of a much wider customer base bring with them greater logistical challenges; items often need to be carefully packed and dispatched abroad, with all the relevant customs declarations and so on. This means that we create business for logistics firms, as well as other ancillary businesses that support the nation’s art and antiques market, now third only to the United and States and China in size and importance globally.
So every time you either decide to consign something like a picture or piece of jewellery to auction, or indeed buy the same, you are setting off a positive chain of activity that supports the economy in a myriad ways. That’s a cheering thought.
Aug 16, 2021
Last issue I wrote about changing tastes and how that has led to an developing roster of sales and departments at auction houses now.
That’s no bad thing; nostalgia and tradition are wonderful concepts, but in business they should not get in the way of progress. Thirty years ago, most fine art and antique auctions were trade affairs. Those bidding were largely dealers, with the odd well-informed collector competing against them for lots. Catalogues, if they existed at all, tended to be cursory, with little detail about what was being sold – you really had to attend the view and know what to look for if you wanted to dig out the treasures.
That all changed when auctioneers realised that if they did a good enough job and made things as clear as possible, including the whole process of buying, then they could sell direct to the public too and business would grow.
In recent years, and especially now as most sales have gone almost completely online, clarity matters all the more. Technology has allowed auction houses to provide more and better pictures of each lot, online or email condition reports and easy access to bidding live or via timed auction over the internet.
What they have also been able to do is market sales better. So what might simply have been promoted as a furniture auction decades ago can now become more focused as, say, a post-war design or interiors sale. By putting more thought into the way lots are grouped and presented, they can make them more attractive to the right bidders and increase demand and prices.
This is a vital part of our expertise today, whether you are selling high-end jewellery and pictures or simple collectables.
Aug 9, 2021
Changing tastes in art, antiques and collectables are reflected in what makes the headlines these days and also how auction houses and dealers have altered the way in which they present items for sale.
If you consider that the strict definition of antique is something over 100 years old, it is easy to appreciate how this presents us with an ever-changing selection of pieces that fall into this category.
When the first antiques fairs started at Olympia in London, back in the late 1920s, the cut-off dateline determining what was and what was not allowed to be offered excluded anything Victorian because they would not yet have been antiques.
Today, anything from the First World War or Edwardian period is easily antique, while Art Deco, long accepted as a venerable collecting category to stand alongside older items at antiques fairs and in fine art and antique auctions, is still not antique.
You’d be amazed at how many people have spent huge amounts of time fretting over the distinction; in recent years we have largely neutralised the argument by adopting additional terms like Vintage and Retro, which can have looser definitions and also appeal more directly to younger buyers. No one has yet come up with an all-encompassing term that covers all eras and still has the power to appeal to all ages of buyers.
Language does matter though. How you market your wares can make a huge difference to whose attention you grab: Ephemera anyone? How about Love Letters? See what I mean?
People say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but that’s exactly what many of us do all the time, and we would be fools to ignore the fact.
