Maine Antique Digest March 2015

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12-D Maine Antique Digest, March 2015
- FEATURE -
Atriumphant end of year sale
as far as Sotheby’s were con-
cerned was one titled “Daughter
of History: Mary Soames and the
Legacy of Churchill,” held in a
glare of publicity on December
17, 2014.
Born in 1922, the youngest
child of Winston and Clementine
Churchill, Mary was the only
one of their children to grow up
at Churchill’s beloved home at
Chartwell in Kent—enjoying a
“golden childhood” in the words
of her own son—but during
World War II she served in the
Auxiliary Territorial Service and
acted as one of her father’s close
confidantes and aides-de-camp,
a role that made her witness to
many important wartime meet-
ings and brought her into contact
with such other major figures as
Eisenhower and Montgomery,
Roosevelt, and Stalin.
After the war she married
Christopher Soames, a Cold-
stream Guards officer who
became a politician and subse-
quently a diplomat. Mary, who
like her father before her wrote
an acclaimed biography of a par-
ent, in her case her mother, died
in 2014, and the 255 lots that
made up this enormously suc-
cessful sale, a selection from the
contents of her London home,
proved an irresistible attraction.
Even the catalogues sold out.
Over 4000 people viewed the
sale, some 900 people from 47
different countries registered
to bid, either in the room or on
line—two-thirds of them new to
Sotheby’s—and the result was a
“white glove” sale, with all lots
sold and, more significantly, all
bar a small proportion of them
selling above estimate to raise a
total of $24.25 million.
Of the “Top Ten” lots, all bar
one were paintings by or of her
father, and right at the top of
the list was Winston’s 1932 oil
The Goldfish Pool at Chartwell
seen upper right. One of 15 of
his paintings in the sale, this was
not of course in the same league
as one of Monet’s famous water
garden oils, but it was described
by Sotheby’s as “undoubtedly
Churchill’s masterpiece” of that
decade, and in postwar years he
certainly selected it for inclusion
in his 1948 book, Painting as a
Pastime.
Agift from her father and once
prominently displayed over the
mantelpiece in the drawing-room
of her home, it more than trebled
the estimate to sell at $2,767,600
and in so doing became the most
expensive painting by Churchill
ever sold at auction*.
Though it is something that
is not easy to define, substanti-
ate, or justify, it might also be
claimed as marking out Chur-
chill as the world’s best-selling
amateur artist. This tentative and
perhaps irrelevant claim may of
course be disputed, challenged,
dismissed, or ignored by M.A.D.
readers.
The pictures were primarily,
if not entirely sold to private
buyers, and this top lot went to
an English collector, as did an
early (circa 1920) oil of A Villa
at the Riviera, which made a six
times estimate $1,040,300, but
Winston Churchill has a great
many American admirers and at
least five of the other best sell-
ing pictures by Churchill went to
American private buyers—four
at sums in excess of $1 mil-
lion.
Among them were an oil of
The Harbour, Cannes dated to
circa 1933, another reminder that
the French Riviera was the Chur-
chills’ preferred holiday destina-
tion, which sold at $1,134,520,
and an English view, a 1920s
painting showing the cathedral
city of Wells in Somerset that
reached $1,096,830.
The landscape that I have cho-
sen to illustrate actually came
in at No. 10 on the best-sellers
list, but it is one that combines
two of Churchill’s off-duty pas-
times and passions—painting
and bricklaying. The 1937 oil
showing The Weald of Kent
under Snow, painted from Chart-
well, seen upper right, has as a
backdrop a wintery prospect of
the view across the Weald from
Churchill’s home at Chartwell,
near Westerham in Kent, but in
the foreground are some of the
walls that he built around the
kitchen gardens.
Thiswasapastime thatChurch-
ill found relaxing and far
removed from the worlds of war
and politics, though one that,
like painting, would also have
given him plenty of time to think
things through, and one of the
catalogue photographs shows
him hard at work on his walls,
trowel in hand and the trademark
cigar clamped firmly in place.
Made by al-Ahmar al-Nu-
jumi al-Rumi for the trea-
sury of an Ottoman Sultan,
Bayezid II, in the first decade of
the 16th century, the instrument
seen top left next page is one of
only two astrolabes recorded as
having been made especially for
this Turkish ruler—in fact, for
any Ottoman sultan. The other
one, made by Shukrallah Mukhis
Shirwani in the Persian style and
more ornately, even distinctively
decorated is in the Museum of
Islamic Art in Cairo.
The workmanship seen in this
recently sold brass instrument
was described by Sotheby’s in
the catalogue for an October 8,
2014, sale of Islamic works of
art as “competent,” but they also
observed that it was primarily an
instrument intended to be used
rather than just admired, and rep-
resents the beginning of a new
Ottoman tradition for more mod-
estly decorated astrolabes—a
tendency that had already been
seen in earlier Syrian pieces that
were made, or at least designed
by the astronomers themselves
rather than as presentation pieces
by professional craftsmen.
All other surviving Ottoman
astrolabes are of later date,
by at least a century, and the
Letter from London
by Ian McKay, >
Winston Churchill continues to attract
adulation and huge prices in the sales-
room, as one of the last of the old year
sales in London so clearly showed, but in this
selection he is joined in his staggering success
by the most expensive watch ever made, a $24
million “Supercomplication” sold in Geneva.
From other London sales come an old astrolabe,
recovered and restituted porcelain, portrait min-
iatures, Turk’s head cutlery, a marble Virgin, and
two youngsters on a fence. This month’s selec-
tion also includes a couple of lots that were not
to be found in prestigious salesroom venues of
central London and Geneva, but in two country
salesrooms. A corkscrew and a ship’s figurehead
that made big prices were both found in Essex.
A “Daughter of History” and the
Churchill Legacy
Pictures of, rather than by,
Churchill were led by Sir
Oswald Birley’s half-length por-
trait of Churchill wearing one of
the “siren” suits that he famously
adopted during World War II—a
one-piece garment initially
designed for easy use when
sirens sounded the need to seek
safety in air-raid shelters—but it
was painted in postwar years, in
1950. Estimated to sell for some-
thing in the region of $300,000,
it was secured by an anonymous
bidder for a much, much higher
$2,239,990.
This was far and away the
highest price ever seen for a Bir-
ley painting—the previous best
being $84,930 for a 1950 por-
trait of HRH Princess Elizabeth
of England that sold at Drew-
eatts & Bloomsbury Auctions
in London in 2014—but again I
have selected something a little
cheaper for illustration.
Seen bottom right is Edwin
Arthur Ward’s portrait of a much
younger Winston Churchill,
seated at a desk. This picture
dates from around 1900, but in
1886 Ward had painted a portrait
(still at Chartwell) of Church-
ill’s father, Lord Randolph
Spencer-Churchill (at the time
both Chancellor of the Exche-
quer and Leader of the House of
Commons), who is seen sitting
at the same desk, on the same
heavy oak chair, and dressed in
an identical black coat, waistcoat
and tie.
When this later picture was
painted, the young Winston was
engaged in writing a biography
of his father, something which
would have provided an apt con-
text for the commission itself
and might explain the close sim-
ilarities of its setting—though
he was also starting to make a
name for himself as a politician,
rather than as a writer and war
correspondent.
The pictures were not the
only lots that brought far, far
higher than expected bids in this
remarkable sale.
The silver jug pictured at top
right is a Comyns & Sons piece
hallmarked for 1942, but it was
a birthday gift presented to him
that same year by fellow mem-
bers of the War Cabinet and
intended to commemorate the
crucial Allied victory over Rom-
mel’s Afrika Korps in North
Africa, at El Alamein. Valued
by Sotheby’s at $6000/10,000, it
sold instead at $437,320!
The red leather dispatch box
seen above right dates from
Churchill’s short time as Sec-
retary of State for the Colonies
(1921-22) and was something
that sold for close on to 30 times
the suggested sum, at $248,890.
An Asprey burr yew and ivory
humidor of circa 1930 was a
reminder that, like her father,
Mary Soames was fond of cigars
and would compete with him as
to who could maintain the long-
est tip of ash. It sold at a huge
$33,370.
Among the signed photo-
Churchill’s 1932
oil painting of The
Goldfish Pool at
Chartwell, sold for
$2,767,600. Descen-
dants of the occu-
pants, Golden Orfe,
can still be seen at
Chartwell.
Winston Churchill’s
principal hobbies
were painting and
bricklaying and this
oil, sold for $983,775,
shows a view across
the snow covered
kitchen gardens of
Chartwell and the
walls that he built to
surround them.
graphs, two that stand out are
one of Franklin D. Roosevelt
that the President gave to the
young Mary Churchill in 1943,
when she accompanied her
father to the first Quebec Con-
ference, and another of Eisen-
hower and Churchill that dates
from Churchill’s last visit to the
U.S.A. as Britain’s Prime Min-
ister, in the summer of 1954.
Modestly valued at just a few
thousand dollars apiece, they
sold for $51,035 and $58,885,
respectively.
*As one of England’s most
famous sons, it is perhaps unsur-
prising that the most sought-af-
ter and expensive (as well as the
rarest) of Churchill’s pictures
have generally featured English
views or subjects, and the previ-
ous record of $2.03 million was
set in 2007 in the same rooms
for Chartwell Landscape with
Sheep.
Edwin Arthur
Ward’s portrait of
a young Winston,
circa 1900, sold
for $192,360.
Dating from Churchill’s time as
Secretary of State for the Colo-
nies in the early 1920s, this bat-
tered red leather dispatch box
sold for $248,890 at Sotheby’s.
Distinctive red boxes such as
this have been used to hold state
documents since the 1840s, and
one of the oldest survivors, Wil-
liam Gladstone’s battered old
dispatch box, is to this day still
used by the Chancellor of the
Exchequer and held aloft by him
on Budget Day.
Inscribed “Egypt 1942…,” this silver jug was pre-
sented to Churchill by members of the War Cab-
inet to celebrate his birthday and, more impor-
tantly, the turning point in the war marked by the
Allies’ victories in North Africa. In a subsequent
speech, Churchill famously said of this victory,
“Now is not the end, it is not even the beginning
of the end. But it is perhaps, the end of the begin-
ning.” The jug sold for $437,320.
The Sultan’s Astrolabe—Made by “The Red One”