Belmont House and other important clients is the title of a three day online sale by Sheppards of Durrow on February 3, 4 and 5. The auction will feature a large range of antique furniture, art, jewellery and collectibles among more than 1300 lots. The catalogue is online.
This William IV burr walnut and ebony inlaid card table sold for a hammer price of 800 at Victor Mee’s January decorative interiors sale yesterday. The auction of 1,140 lots continues today and can be followed on easyliveauction.com
The family collection of Patricia Mountbatten, whose father, son and mother in law were murdered by the IRA, will come up at Sotheby’s in London on March 24. The 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma was one of seven people aboard Shadow V when it was blown up by the Provisional IRA off Cliffoney, Co. Sligo in August 1979.The party comprised Lord Mountbatten, Lord John Brabourne (Patricia’s husband), their 14 year old twins Timothy and Nicholas, Lord Brabourne’s mother Lady Doreen Brabourne and 15 year old Paul Maxwell from Fermanagh, a friend of the family. Mountbatten, Nicholas Brabourne and Maxwell were killed immediately. Lady Brabourne died the next day and the others survived serious injuries. In a press release Sotheby’s say that Lady Mountbatten, who died in 2017, dealt with her tragedies with extraordinary courage and grace. More than 350 lots from Newhouse, the Brabourne’s 18th century home, will come under the hammer at Sotheby’s on March 24 with estimates ranging from £80 to £100,000. The sale unveils tales of an important family through the art and objects they lived with. Born in 1924 Patricia Mountbatten was great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, great niece of Russia’s last Tsarina, first cousin to Prince Philip and the daughter of Britain’s last Viceroy of India. She had an unconventional upbringing, from weekend parties with King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson at her parents’ estate in Hampshire to evacuation on the eve of the Blitz to stay with Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III in her palatial Fifth Avenue apartment in New York. In 1943 Patricia entered the Women’s Royal Navy Service and met John Knatchbull, 7th Lord Brabourne (1924-2005). They married in 1946. As a Captain in the armed forces, Brabourne had worked for Patricia’s father in India, and later became an Academy-Award nominated film producer, behind titles such as A Passage to India and Agatha Christie adaptations Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express.
When Patricia inherited her father’s peerages, the pair became one of the very few married couples in England each of whom held a peerage in his or her own right and the custodians of two great inheritances. John’s included Mersham le Hatch, an elegant house by Robert Adam in the Kent countryside, where the Knatchbull family had settled in the 15th century. Furnished by the great Thomas Chippendale in the 1770s, it held within it objects with extraordinarily diverse provenances, including the explorer and botanist Sir Joseph Banks who travelled to Australia on Cook’s first expedition, Jane Austen’s beloved niece Fanny and the Marquesses of Sligo. Patricia inherited precious objects associated with her parents from their Art Deco penthouse on Park Lane – with treasures from Edwina’s maternal grandfather, the great Edwardian financier Sir Ernest Cassel – and their time in India.
Among the lots to be offered is an Anglo-Indian inlaid bureau on stand supplied by Thomas Chippendale to Sir Edward Knatchbull in 1767. It is estimated at £40,000-£60,000. The stand was made by Chippendale for the sum of £4 to house the Indian inlaid miniature bureau. The sale of 350 lots will offer jewellery, furniture, paintings, sculpture, books, silver, ceramics and objets d’art.
UPDATE: Over 1,400 participants from 55 countries drove the sale total to £5,620,798, over three times the pre-sale estimate with 98% of lots sold.
The Leinster House cabinets sold for £106,250 at Christie’s in London today. By Thomas Chippendale junior they were part of a remarkable furniture sale entitled Apter-Fredericks: 75 Years of Important English Furniture. Originally at Leinster House, then at Carton, they remained in the possession of the FitzGerald family over the centuries. The hammer price was £85,000 and the top estimate was £60,000.
A Regency Imperial extending dining table by Gillows of Lancaster commissioned for Westport House sold for £87,500. The sale of 140 lots brought in £3,408,750.
(See posts on antiquesandartireland.com for June 3, 2015, December 3, 2020, January 2, 2021 and January 17, 2021)
The Apter-Fredericks auction online at Christie’s on January 19 has garnered enormous interest. There are a number of fine Irish pieces on sale. Shown here is a c1750 Irish George II bottle carrier. Used in the dining room it was on casters to allow drinks to be circulated among the guests. Apter-Fredericks have closed their London shop after 75 years and moved to an online model. This sale offers some truly exceptional pieces of fine antique furniture.
(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for January 2, 2021)
The catalogue for Dolan’s first timed online art auction is now online. There is art by John Shinnors, Maggie Morrisson, Harry Kernoff, Mark O’Neill, Charles Harper and others together with antique and collectibles, rugs and books. The auction runs until January 25.
FROM jewellery to artwork there promises to be a diverse selection on offer at the virtual art fair which Hibernian Antique Fairs will run on January 16-17. A link to access the fair will be made available on the Hibernian Antiques Fairs facebook page on January 16. Dealers taking part will show photographs of what is on offer plus contact and delivery details. Among those taking part are Treasures Irish Art of Athlone. They will show a number of works by the self taught London born Irish painter Ken Moroney (1949-2018). He specialised in Impressionist painting and romantic Edwardian style subjects.
The James Adam timed online sale of contents from the Wellington Road, Dublin home of former restaurateur Peter White, who is downsizing, draws to a conclusion on January 11. Louis le Brocquy’s Red Roses For Me, a 1946 watercolour inspired by O’Casey’s play about a Dublin Protestant family against the background of the 1913 Lockout, is the top lot of 284. It comes with an estimate of €8,000-€12,000. There are no less than 31 works landscapes and cityscapes by the Dublin born Italian Irish painter Niccolo Caracciolo RHA, who died in a car crash near Siena in 1989. The sale offers a selection of furniture, silver, china, glassware, Persian rugs and household effects.
It isn’t great but it isn’t all bad either. Pandemic closures are horrible but there is much to explore online. If, for instance, you thought you might never get to visit the Mayfair Antiques Fair in London or the New York Winter Show, you were wrong. In 2021 they are available at the touch of a button on your computer.This is part of an ongoing shift online. All the data so far available from 2020 strongly suggests that large numbers of people who might never go to an auction viewing are buying online. At Christie’s, for instance, preliminary figures suggest that 36% of all buyers last year were new to the auction house. This experience is repeated everywhere else as the pandemic delivers new customers.Another statistic from Christie’s showed that 32% of all new online buyers were millennials (23 to 38 years old). In case you are wondering they are the ones who come after Generation X and before Generation Z. So the pandemic is leading large numbers of buyers straight to auction, spawning a new generation of young collectors and opening up specialist fairs to people everywhere. Anything positive in the midst of this lockdown is to be warmly welcomed and this bit of positivity is likely to have a long term impact.
The Mayfair Antiques Fair usually takes place at the London Marriott Hotel in Grosvenor Square. This year it is in a new online guise. It opened on Thursday and continues today and tomorrow at www.mayfairfair.com There are 43 stands with a diverse mix of art and antiques dealers, mainly members of the British Antique Dealers Association or LAPADA, The Association of Art and Antique Dealers.There is much to choose from including a monumental first period Emile Galle vase enamelled with exotic flowers, a Chinese export reverse painted mirror plate in a Chippendale period frame, a pair of George III tea caddies made in London by William Frisbee in 1793, fine jewellery, art, antique furniture and collectibles.In New York the new virtual Winter Show runs from January 22-31 with preview access from January 19. It will bring together 60 leading international dealers with fine and decorative arts from ancient times to the present day. Visitors can taken in visual presentations and view close ups. All objects on view are vetted for authenticity, date and condition.There are leading dealers from New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Chicago, Zurich and a variety of other locations. Among them are Ronald Phillips from London, Aronson, Amsterdam, A La Vielle Russie, New York, Apter-Fredericks, London, Elle Shusan, Philadelphia, Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York and Les Enluminures of Chicago.
From the Westport House table to the Leinster House cabinets there is much of Irish interest in a sale for furniture specialists at Christie’s in London on January 19. Apter-Fredericks: 75 Years of Important English Furniture encompasses some spectacular Irish pieces as it marks the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. Internationally renowned for the superlative quality, condition and provenance of their pieces, Apter-Fredericks remains an industry byword for the very finest furniture and works of art, a reputation which has been built by three generations of the family over the last 75 years. The firm is giving up their Fulham Road, London showroom in order to spend more time in pursuit of masterpieces and visiting clients.
It is a great pity that at home and abroad the new world that beckons makes little room for fine antique shops like this in expensive downtown locations. Antique furniture is as green as you can get. So it is more than a little perverse that in a world with growing awareness of the urgent need to tackle climate change there is little room for shops selling the ultimate recyclable.
Christie’s wlll offer 140 lots including work by the foremost craftspeople and designers of the 18th and 19th centuries like Chippendale, Ince and Mayhew, Linnell, Gomm, Lock, Bullock and Gillows, as well as some Chinese works of art. The Westport House dining table (£50,000-£80,000), capable of extending beyond 30 feet, is attributed to Gillows. It was purchased by Howe Peter Browne (1788-1845), the 2nd Marquess of Sligo. As governor of Jamaica he supported the emancipation of slaves. It is possible that the mahogany for the table came from Jamaica.The Leinster House cabinets (£40,000-£60,000), are thought to have been commissioned by the 2nd Duke of Leinster in 1777-78 and have been in the possession of the FitzGerald family ever since. Another highlight is a c1750 Irish side table. The carved pierced apron with foliage, shells and a central cartouche with a bird, is a good example of the Irish style. It came from a private collection in the US.A c1740 side table is described as English or possibly Irish. Apter-Frederick say the quirky nature of the overall proportion suggests a provincial or Irish origin. There is an Irish bottle stand and an Irish George III giltwood and verre eglomise mirror. Verre egomise is a process where there is both a design and gilding on glass to produce a mirror finish. This one, dated 1798, is by Josias Phillips, Wards Hill, Dublin.
(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for December 3, 2020)
