Maine Antique Digest, December 2016

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6-D Maine Antique Digest, December 2016
- FEATURE --
6-D London
Letter from London
by Ian McKay, >
A rather unusual “Letter” this month. With many of the early
season London sales given over to modern and contemporary
art, I thought it might make a change to tackle something different.
Noting that Bonhams had held quite a lot of car, motorcycle, and
general automobilia sales in recent weeks—in England, Belgium,
and France—I plucked up courage and dipped into an auction world
in which, I here admit, I feel rather more out of my depth than usual.
However, in I dived and got somewhat carried away. I hope that
some of what follows will appeal to some readers, but for those who
are not at all interested in this sort of thing, I offer my apologies and
point out that there are also quite a few words on Brian Sewell’s
picture collection, one of George Daniels’ special “Anniversary”
watches, and a cue stand.
Renowned British art critic,
journalist and author Brian
Sewell, who died in 2015, was a
man who regularly courted con-
troversy through what some oth-
ers regarded as his unfashionable
views and his forthright dismissal
of art and artists that he despised.
In the distinctive, high-pitched,
plummy and, to some, almost
comically affected voice that
made his pronouncements unmis-
takable, he once called fellow
art critics “a feeble, compliant,
ignorant lot,” and of Britain’s
ever-controversial Turner Prize
for contemporary art, he sug-
gested that “Ignoring it is the
kindest thing one can do.”
Inevitably, Sewell raised hack-
les in the art world, and in the
1980s one group of 36 offended
critics and members of the arts
world signed a letter to the editor
of a national daily, the Evening
Standard, demanding that he be
sacked as their art critic.
They accused him of both “vir-
ulent homophobia and misog-
yny” and of being “deeply hostile
to and ignorant about contempo-
rary art.”
Sewell’s response, according to
a recent BBC obituary, was “We
pee on things, we pee into things,
we pee over things and we call it
art. I don’t know what art is, but I
do know what it isn’t.”
It was, however, Sewell’s role
as a collector that was remem-
bered and celebrated in a $4.857
million sale held on Septem-
ber 27 at Christie’s—an auc-
tion that showed the breadth of
his interests, from the works of
16th-century artists of the Italian
Renaissance to those of his near
contemporaries.
Sewell had worked in the
saleroom’s picture department
between 1958 and 1966, and Noël
Annesley, a former deputy chair-
man of Christie’s U.K. who had
once worked as his assistant, pro-
duced an appreciation of Sewell
for the saleroom’s website. Part
of the online catalogue, it was at
the time of writing still accessible
That BBC obituary and other
details relating to the career and
life of this controversial and
colourful critic may also be found
online.
The most successful of the
Sewell lots, at a five times esti-
mate $1,033,710, was a large and
highly finished study in black
chalk that relates to Daniele Ric-
ciarelli’s bronze sculpture of a
sleeping Dido that is now in the
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in
Munich.
A painter as well as a sculptor,
Ricciarelli, or Daniele da Volterra
as he was also called, often cast
bronze models in preparation for
his pictures and used drawings of
those casts to explore and plan
his compositions in great detail—
presumably to test which view-
points would best suit the final
painting.
Sewell’s drawing follows the
Munich bronze with precision,
said the cataloguer. “The shad-
ows are indicated with very fine
hatching and the body is mod-
ulated with such fine lines that
they almost dissolve and give the
figure a sculptural quality.”
(The Munich bronze, it should
be noted, had been acquired by
the museum as a work by Adri-
aen de Vries [circa 1556-1626]
and was only correctly identified
as being by Daniele in 1993, by
Professor Paul Joannides.)
This figure seen in the study
offered at Christie’s also appears
in a painting by, or after the art-
ist, called Aeneas commanded by
Mercury to leave Dido. The pres-
ent whereabouts of that picture
are unknown but the large num-
ber of studies for the painting that
survive are testimony to the care
that Daniele took in preparing it.
Sewell’s picture may be the only
surviving drawing of Dido, but
there are five extant studies for
the child who assists Aeneas to
disrobe.
It is thought that Sewell’s
drawing once belonged to Filippo
Buonarotti, a descendant of
Michelangelo, and when first
sold by Christie’s in 1860 (for
18 guineas) it was catalogued
as “A Female Figure Reclin-
ing: A Model for the Tomb of
the Medici.” Its true creator was
revealed only after it had arrived
at Christie’s—and as Annesley
remarked in his essay on Sewell,
“…it’s a shame that he was not
able to enjoy its recent identifi-
cation as one of Daniele’s most
beautiful drawings.”
Of three paintings by Matthias
Stomer (c. 1600-after 1652) that
Sewell was particularly proud of,
two failed to sell, but a portrait of
St. Jerome brought a double esti-
mate $473,405. When purchased
by Sewell at Sotheby’s in 1981,
it was still attributed to Hendrik
van Somer.
Sold for $457,840, a chalk, ink
and wash drawing by Baldassare
Peruzzi (1481-1536) was the ear-
liest work in Sewell’s collection
and another of those works that
he regarded with particular pride
and joy.
It is a design for a bench that
in its five niches contains figures
thought to depict heroes of past
times—though that on the far
left is identified only as “a young
hero” and the fellow on the far
right has been only tentatively
linked with Julius Caesar. The
others are more formally named
as Marcus Atilius Regulus, Her-
cules, and Lucius Junius Brutus.
It was following the 1527 Sack
of Rome by mutinous troops
of the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V that Peruzzi left Rome
and returned for a few years to his
native Siena.
There he was appointed
“Architetto della Repubblica”
and it was probably in this capac-
ity that he executed this drawing
as a possible feature of the Sala
del Cancelleria, or Chancery
Room, in the city’s planned new
Palazzo Pubblica. The drawing is
inscribed by the artist with alter-
native sets of measurements for
the projected bench, but that par-
ticular project was never realised.
Avery different side to Sewell’s
tastes and collecting is seen in
an oil by Sir William Quiller
Orchardson (1832-1910) featured
among the accompanying illus-
trations. Aportrait of Ophelia, the
tragic heroine of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, seated on the banks of a
woodland stream, where “a wil-
low grows aslant a brook” and in
which she later drowned, it was
sold at $56,745.
A youthful prodigy who had
entered the Trustees’Academy of
Edinburgh aged just 13, Orchard-
son at first painted mainly literary
scenes, drawing inspiration from
the works of Shakespeare, Scott,
Dickens, and Keats, among oth-
ers, until moving to London in
Daniele Ricciarelli’s study in
black chalk of a sleeping Dido sold
for $1,033,710 as part of the Brian
Sewell sale.
A chalk, ink, and wash design by Baldassare Peruzzi for a memorial
bench sold for $457,840.
Matthias Stomer’s portrait of St.
Jerome sold at $473,405.
1862. In his later career he turned
his hand to historical subjects,
portraiture and to the “psycho-
logical dramas of upper-class
life” by which he is perhaps best
remembered. An 1883 painting
on the subject of The Marriage of
Convenience is a good example
of the latter.
Sewell, as Noël Annesley
noted, may have become famous
for his trenchant reviews of the
British art scene and his denun-
ciation of many contemporary
artists and fawning fellow critics,
but he also found much to admire
in the art of the 20th century.
Harold Gilman, Duncan Grant,
Augustus John (whose two stu-
dio sales Sewell catalogued at
Christie’s), John Minton, and
Walter Sickert were among the
artists whose work appealed to
him, as was John Craxton, whose
pencil drawing of his friend,
Lucian Freud sold at $64,850.
*A few other works from the
Sewell sale are illustrated in that
online article by Noël Annesley.
They sold as follows: An oil on
canvas study of the Madonna
& Child with Saints Ignatius of
Loyola, Francis Xavier, Cosmas
and Damian by Andrea Sacchi
that relates to his ceiling fresco of
circa 1629 in the Old Pharmacy
of the Collegio Romano in Rome
went at $302,200; a squared
black chalk drawing of a soldier
carrying a ladder by Agostino
Ciampelli (1565-1630) sold for
$154,020; a pencil, chalk, and
ink drawing of a seated male
nude by James Barry of Cork
(1741-1806) sold at $113,490;
and a 1959 tempera on board
still life of Twelve Pheasant Eggs
by Eliot Hodgkin made $61,610.
John Craxton’s pencil drawing of
his friend Lucian Freud sold at
$64,850.
“I Don’t Know What Art Is,
but I Do Know What It Isn’t”
Sir William Quiller Orchardson’s portrait of Ophelia sold for $56,745.
Scull and Crossed Oars
O ffered with an early 20th-century mahogany
scoreboard of fairly standard form, this bil-
liards cue stand is rather more of a novelty. Stand-
ing 8' high, it is formed from the bow of a rowing
scull and decorated with a shield, crossed oars and
a legend that links it to the Cambridge R[owing]
C[lub] and the Henley Royal Regatta of 1896.
Nowadays held over a five-day period in July,
the world famous annual regatta’s origins lie
traditionally in the first Oxford v. Cambridge
university boat race, which was held on a course
from Hambleden to Henley-on-Thames in 1829.
In a Bonhams sale of October 11 that described
itself as “A Royal Collection: The Contents of an
English Country House,” the cue stand and score-
board together sold for $765.