Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire feeding her chickens at Chatsworth, 1995 wearing a Balmain ball gown and pearls. Copyright Bruce Weber
Hundreds of collectors battled at Sotheby’s in London today for the sale of personal possessions of Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire. The auction brought £1.8 million, three times the pre-sale estimate of £500,000-700,000. The top lot was a Japanese lacquer and ivory mounted guardian figure Meiji Period which sold for £62,500. The same price was paid for a c1880 diamond and ruby brooch designed as a butterfly. The first edition of Brideshead Revisited given to her by Evelyn Waugh sold for a record £52,500, two pine and plywood travelling poultry boxes used by the chatelaine of Chatsworth to take her hens to country shows made £10,625, her personal keyring made £2,000, Nancy Mitford’s painting of their childhood home made £15,000 and the Duchess’s Elvis Presley memorabilia collection made £4,375. Her friends included President Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Lucian Freud, Evelyn Waugh, Alan Bennett, members of The Royal Family, Hubert de Givenchy, Oscar de la Renta and Cecil Beaton. The 450 lots largely came from The Old Vicarage, the 18th-century house on the Chatsworth Estate where the Duchess spent the last ten years of her life.
(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for January 22, 2016).