The 1937 poster for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the most expensively estimated lot at Sotheby’s online auction of original film posters. This was Walt Disney’s first feature film so it is a prized piece for any collector. It features the full cast with the dreamy castle in the background and is estimated at £12,000-18,000. The sale runs online from August 27 to September 7. The lots on offer demonstrate over 100 years of cinematic history from across the globe. There is promotional materials including posters, lobby cards, production stills and original artworks used to herald some of the world’s most iconic films with estimates from £300 upwards.
In a major push to focus on diversity and inclusion MGM Resorts plans to sell its Picasso’s. MGM Resorts and Sotheby’s will present a one of a kind marquee evening sale of Picasso masterworks worth millions live from Bellagio in Las Vegas on October 23. The world renowned entertainment company plans to re-shape its public art portfolio. The unique collaboration between Sotheby’s and MGM represents the first time Sotheby’s has hosted a marquee sale in North America outside its signature New York venue. It will feature a recreated version of the New York saleroom in Las Vegas. The sale will be broadcast around the world via a livestream viewable on Sothebys.com
Featuring 11 works that showcase the range and breadth of Pablo Picasso’s celebrated career, the auction includes a highly curated selection of paintings, works on paper, and ceramics that span more than 50 years of artistic output from 1917 to 1969. The highlight of the collection is Femme au béret rouge-orange ($20/30 million), one of Picasso’s defining portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter. The artist’s muse and lover inspired many of his most iconic portraits of the 1930’s.
A question is posed by an online Sotheby’s sale running until August 12. Do you want merely to set the table for dinner or is a creative tablescape more to your taste? If the answer is the latter then “Dining IN” – running as two concurrent auctions in London and New York – is the sale to set your post lockdown celebrations underway. With content ranging from the 19th to the 21st centuries this auction celebrates the dining experience in all its formats. There is a focus on modern silver and ceramics, including Tiffany and Georg Jensen, Meissen and Versace porcelain. From Regency splendour to Victorian whimsy the creative teams involved have brought together a selection of silver, porcelain, glass, furniture and table linen to cater for a variety of tastes. Highlights include a George III silver soup tureen and a Martin Brothers grotesque stoneware spoon warmer from 1881 but there is enough of a selection here to let the imagination run riot.
A pair of silver sculptural candelabra by Patrick Mavros, Zimbabwe 1999 UPDATE: THESE SOLD FOR £10,080
HIS time in power continues to fascinate generations later. Now Sotheby’s plans to commemorate the bicentenary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death with an online auction in September dedicated to the Emperor whose extraordinary destiny continues to fascinate two hundred years after his passing. The sale will offer an extensive overview, with works spanning two centuries of art history and all fields: from 19th-century to contemporary art, sculpture, silverware, furniture, porcelain, jewellery and photography, as well as memorabilia of the Emperor and his loved ones.
Among the most exciting lots in the sale is an emblematic bicorne, a hat that has become inextricably linked with Napoleon’s image. Only nineteen bicornes have been authenticated as having belonged to the Emperor, of which this is one, with a number in the collections of museums worldwide.
The first published edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners comes up at an online sale of Fine Books and Manuscripts at Sotheby’s in New York until July 16. One of a number of works by Joyce in the auction it is estimated at $80,000-$120,000. It is one of approximately 746 copies bound in the publisher’s maroon cloth, with the very rare dust-jacket. A ticket pasted to the rear states that it was de-acidified in 1989. Only six copies in jacket have appeared at auction in the past forty-five years. Sotheby’s say that despite the restorations noted, this is an attractive, near-fine copy.
The sale offers first editions of A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses by Joyce as well as a letter from Oscar Wilde to Aimee Daniell Beringer and a copy of Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance. The catalogue is online.
One of only two known surviving copies of the earliest football rules printed by the world’s first football club, Sheffield Football Club, in 1859 comes up at Sotheby’s in July. The sixteen-page pamphlet, recently discovered bound in a Victorian scrapbook, is estimated to make £50,000-70,000 in London on July 20, with bidding open online from July 12-20. Established in 1857, Sheffield Football Club predated the founding of the Football Association by six years, and is acknowledged by both the FA and FIFA as the world’s oldest football club. The formal rule-based game of football was a Victorian innovation, incubated at public schools and universities. However, it was the foundation of Sheffield Football Club that brought the game into the community.
This pamphlet is also uniquely revised to keep it up to date with developments in the laws of the game. The most significant is the hardening of the rules against handling the ball. The 1858 rules allowed the ball to be “pushed or hit with the hand” but not held (law 8), but in this copy a printed slip disallows “knocking or pushing [the ball] on”. A handwritten note finesses the throw-in, specifying that the ball must “touch the Ground before coming in Contact with any player” (law 10). A new law (law 12) is also added by hand, requiring that flags be placed four yards from each goal post (this was to allow a short-lived secondary scoring system called a rouge). These revisions must have been made before 1862, when the club issued a new rulebook that included these and other changes.
This copy of the Sheffield FC rules was preserved in a scrapbook compiled by a local clergyman, the Rev. Greville John Chester (1830-92). The club’s historic archive was sold at Sotheby’s in 2011 for £881,000.
One of the masterpieces of the Marlborough Collection, The Arundel Zodiac, a rare 16th-century astrological intaglio set in a virtuoso enameled gold pendant, will highlight Sotheby’s third Small Wonders auction online from July 9-15. The sales showcase early gems and jewels from the ancient world through to the early 19th century. The Arundel Zodiac was once in two of the greatest gem collections: the Arundel and Marlborough collections. Like most of the Arundel gems, it is likely to have once been owned by the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua. It is centered by a rare 16th-century intaglio carved with Jupiter astride an eagle, flanked by Mars and Mercury, and Neptune underneath. The composition relates to a design by Raphael engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi. The whole is encircled by a frieze with the signs of the Zodiac. Only three such Zodiac gems exist from the period, in: the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (inv. no. 3706); the Cabinet des medailles, formerly the French royal collection; and the present Arundel Zodiac which is estimated at £120,000-£180,000.
Italian, circa 1540 | The Arundel Zodiac. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £559,500
The sale at Sotheby’s of the manuscripts, first editions, letters and bindings that make up the legendary Honresfield Library – assembled with passion by self-made Victorian industrialists William and Alfred Law at the turn of the 20th century – has been postponed. The Honresfield library contains a treasury of English and Scottish literature including the most important Bronte material to come to light in a generation.
Working together with the UK charity Friends of the National Library (FNL), Sotheby’s has agreed to postpone the commencement of the auctions to allow for negotiations for the entirety of the library to be acquired by a consortium of institutions for the nation. The FNL has launched an appeal with an additional donation from its own resources and will be working over the next months to fundraise with the public and private philanthropists. Institutions involved include the Bodleian Libraries, the British Library, The National Library of Scotland, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, Brotherton Library (University of Leeds), Abbotsford (The Home Of Sir Walter Scott) and Jane Austen’s House, among others.
(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for May 25, 2021)
Walter Scott manuscript of The Lay of the Last Minstrel
Lucian Freud’s 2002 portrait of David Hockney will make its auction debut at Sotheby’s in London on June 29. Painted at the height of Freud’s career, this portrait of David Hockney provides a fascinating window into the narrative of a long episodic friendship that had started forty years earlier. During the spring and summer of 2002 the two titans of British art came together in a private exchange between artist and sitter. After more than a hundred hours of sittings, the result was one of the most masterful peer-to-peer portraits ever committed onto canvas. It will be a highlight at Sotheby’s British Art Evening Sale: Modern/Contemporary when it will be offered with an estimate of £8,000,000-12,000,000.
Lucian Freud – David Hockney, oil on canvas, 2002. (£8-12 million) Copyright Sothebys. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £14,905,200
