Bonhams Magazine Winter 2023 Issue 77

MAGAZINE

WINTER 2023 ISSUE 77

Paul Signac

Artistic visionary

Coco Chanel

The jewel she loved

The Beatles

Story behind their greatest album

Back of the net The art of football and

The Crown Auction

You watched the show, now buy the props and frocks

Antiquities

London Thursday 7 December 10.30am An Egyptian limestone statue of Sekhemankhptah Old Kingdom, 5th Dynasty, circa 2389-2255 B.C. Statue: 121cm high x 51cm wide x 40cm deep; plinth: 91cm x 71cm x 61cm Estimate: £200,000 - 300,000 ($250,000 - 375,000) Enquiries: Francesca Hickin +44 (0) 20 7468 8226 francesca.hickin@bonhams.com

British Museum Magazine / 210*275

Until 21 April 2024

FREE DISPLAY

Open daily 10.00–17.00 Bond Street wallacecollection.org

Art Impressionniste et Moderne Paris Thursday 7 December 3pm

Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) Autoportrait au chat oil on canvas Painted in 1928 34.7 x 27.2cm (13 x 10in) Estimate: €350,000 - 450,000 ($400,000 - 500,000) Enquiries: Bénédicte van Campen +33 1 56 79 12 58 benedicte.vancampen@bonhams.com

Contents Issue 77

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5 Editor’s letter and contributors

Features 18 Off the cuff

He was the Duke of Verdura. She was Coco Chanel, queen of haute couture.

Together, they made epoch-defining jewellery, says Vivienne Becker

22 Driving force

The Grosvenor School was no more than a single house in Pimlico, but their linocuts created a distinctively British style of modernism. Mark Hudson explores their innovations

28 Battle of the sexes

For all eternity, the marble satyr pursues its nymph. Susan Moore considers the many meanings of the sculpture Lord Astor brought from Pompeii

32 A crowning achievement Philippa Stockley goes behind the scenes to discover what made The Crown must-watch television

40 Joining the dots

Has there been a modern painter to rival Paul Signac in capturing the bright sun of southern France? Alastair Smart basks in the light

Columns 46 The fab farewell

When the Beatles wrote ‘The End’ it very nearly was. Hunter Davies recalls the recording of their final masterpiece, Abbey Road

50 Boiling point

The anarchic CoBrA artists raged against any form of restraint.

Lucinda Bredin asks collector Karine Huts why the group made such an impact

54 Eye on the ball

6 News and forthcoming events 15 Inside Bonhams

Charlie Thomas, Director of House Sales and Private & Iconic Collections, tells Sasha Thomas why antique furniture should be used, not just admired

63 Wine

Richard Mayson says pass the port – and best make it vintage

Matthew Sturgis views a world before VAR, when football and the art it inspired spoke the language of everyday people

65 Around the globe

58 Words and pictures

Julianknxx on the non-space that would become his perfect gallery

Simple, haunting and kind – The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse was a post-pandemic hit. Helen Kirwan-Taylor meets its creator, Charlie Mackesy

70 International directory 72 My favourite room

Front cover Paul Signac (1925-2009) Sisteron (detail) 182.3 x 213.2cm (71¾ x 83⅜in) Estimate: $3,000,000 -5,000,000 (£2,500,000 - 4,000,000) Sale: The Alan and Simone Hartman Collection: The Inaugural Sale New York | Thursday 14 December See page 40

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CoBrA Powerful Voices of Post-war Europe Bruun Rasmussen, Copenhagen Tuesday 5 December 7pm Karel Appel (1921-2006) Untitled (detail) 1957 oil on canvas 80 x 150cm (31 x 59in) Estimate: €200,000 - 270,000 ($220,000 - 300,000) Enquiries: Niels Raben +45 8818 1181 nr@bruun-rasmussen.dk

Editor’s letter Humanity is divided into two groups.

There are those who feel impelled to pursue, track down, and generally chase art and objects to add to their collection.

And then there are those who can but dream. It has been noted before that collectors are a breed apart – the impulse and characteristics of the species have been picked over in this letter on many occasions. But this time let’s celebrate the beauty of the fully formed collection, one that has reached its peak and is now ready to be divided once more between others curating their own.

Take the superlative collection of Alan and Simone Hartman, the renowned gallerists. Alan acquired his first piece of jade when he was 12 years old. It was the start of a lifelong passion. For many years, their exceptional paintings and works of art were on display in their New York apartment, with a staggering work by Paul Signac – featured on our cover – displayed over the mantelpiece. Monet, Renoir and Sisley are just a few of the other artists who were hanging in the same room. The cream of the couple’s collection of Impressionist paintings and Asian art arrives at Bonhams New York in December.

In this issue, Alastair Smart joins the dots on Signac’s life and work.

The Grosvenor School prints were aimed at a different demographic. Designed to be affordable, and printed on rustic paper, works by this group of artists have soared in reputation and value since they were first produced in the 1930s. Assembled by a London-based collector over decades, this 1,500-strong collection – one of the largest ever – includes all the best-known prints by this much-loved group: Sybil Andrews’ arc of motorcyclists, Cyril Power’s cascade of commuters on an escalator, Claude Flight’s fluid Routemaster buses… On page 22, Mark Hudson examines the driving force behind this futuristic vision of everyday life which had such a defiantly and idiosyncratic sense of Britishness.

We feature two other collectors: William Waldorf Astor, whose Nymph and Satyr from Hever Castle stars in the Antiquities sale, and Karine Huts, whose collection of CoBrA art continues to grow.

Indeed, Karine has a building – appropriately named the CoBrA Depot – dedicated to her beloved works.

And, finally, this issue previews a sale of props and costumes from the award-winning TV series The Crown. The ‘Revenge dress’, the façade of 10 Downing Street and the gold state carriage are just a few of the highlights. You could start your own collection.

Contributors

Hunter Davies

Hunter wrote the only authorised biography of the Beatles in 1968.

On p.54, he recalls the recording of their classic album Abbey Road. His other enduring love is football, writing The Glory Game (1972), a behind-the-scenes account of Tottenham Hotspur.

His autobiography The Beatles, Football and Me was published in 2006 by Headline, and he was appointed OBE in 2014.

Philippa Stockley

Philippa is a novelist, pai­­nter and journalist, for a decade deputy editor of the Evening Standard’s Homes & Property. Her bestselling historical novels include The Edge of Pleasure and A Factory of Cunning. As a Courtauld Institute-trained clothing historian, Philippa has a keen eye for the brilliance of the sets and costumes of the TV series The Crown, which she writes about on p.32.

Helen Kirwan-Taylor

An artist and journalist, Helen writes for the Financial Times, The Times, The Telegraph and Harper’s Bazaar. Her first solo exhibition was held at Themes & Variations gallery in London in 2014 and she has contributed to the Cube3 charity auction. On p.58, she meets Charlie Mackesy, the creator of post-pandemic publishing sensation The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.

Vivienne Becker

Vivienne is a jewellery historian, journalist and author of 30 books on the subject. Contributing Editor to How to Spend It, she writes for Tatler UK, WSJ Magazine, Vanity Fair and Bazaar Jewelry China.

Her books include Art Nouveau Jewelry and The Impossible Collection: the 100 Most Important Jewels of the 20th Century.

Vivienne also curates the Designer Vivarium in Geneva.

Julianknxx

Julian is a poet, artist and filmmaker, born in Sierra Leone.

His family fled the civil war when he was in his teens, and he settled in London. His multidisciplinary art has been shown in London at the Whitechapel Gallery and Gagosian, and in Lisbon at the Gulbenkian.

Julian’s Chorus in Rememory of Flight is at the Barbican Curve – also his favourite room (p.72) – until February 2024.

Follow us on Instagram and X: @bonhams1793; email: press@bonhams.com Editor Lucinda Bredin Editorial Sasha Thomas, Hongmiao Shi, Hannele Hellerstedt, Nicola Griffin, Emily Owen Copy Editor Simon Coppock Designer Nathan Brown Assistant Designer Cristina Santos Photographs Bonhams Photography Advertising Enquiries renata@parkwalkmedia.com Published four times a year by Bonhams 1793 Ltd, 101 New Bond Street, London W1S 1SR Subscription (four issues) £25 for the UK, £30 for Europe or £35 for the rest of the world, inclusive of postage. Subscription Enquiries jacqueline.senior@bonhams.com; ISSN 1745-2643. Issue 77 © Bonhams 1793 Ltd, 2023. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of Bonhams. All dates are correct at the time of publication. All sales are subject to Bonhams Terms & Conditions. Sale dates may be subject to alteration.

Currency exchange rates correct at the time of publication. bonhams.com. Should you no longer wish to receive this magazine, please contact jacqueline.senior@bonhams.com

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NEWS

News

T We want Moore There was both shaking and stirring in London in October, as guests gathered to honour the late actor Sir Roger Moore and his collection of James Bond memorabilia, collectables and personal ephemera. Among those who joined with the Moore family with a glass of Champagne and classic 007 Martinis were Barbara Broccoli, powerhouse producer of the James Bond franchise, Tim Rice and Jemma Kidd. Two days later, the collection was offered in a ten-hour auction marathon. With bids flying in from around the world, the auction achieved £1.1 million more than three times the estimate – and was a white-glove sale.

Ambra Moore, Deborah Moore & Barbara Broccoli

© Richard Young

In and out of Bonhams’ salerooms

Arpad Busson & Jemma Kidd

Eva & Tim Rice

T

Top marques On his 50th birthday in September 1931, Ettore Bugatti could already look back with great satisfaction on a life of achievements.

He founded an automobile company under his own name while he was still in his 20s, manufactured motor cars and aeroplane engines in his 30s, and, in his 40s, created not only the most successful race car of its time – the Type 35 – but also the era’s largest and most luxurious motor car – the Type 41 ‘Royale’. In the run-up to his landmark birthday, Ettore placed an order with French watchmaker Breguet for a silver humpback clock costing 60,000 francs, the price of a luxury car. Bugatti no doubt felt a connection

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to the historic watchmakers, renowned like him as inventors and pioneers. Breguet and Bugatti would go on to collaborate on nine timepieces specifically for Bugatti cars. However the silver humpback clock was to accompany Bugatti for the rest of his life, as he steered his company towards many more successful cars and racing titles. During the 1960s, it was bought back

by Breguet and acquired by the collection of another family, who will offer it in Bonhams’ Fine Clocks auction in London on 29 November.

Enquiries: James Stratton +44 (0) 20 7468 8364 james.stratton@bonhams.com

Paul McKenna and Guest

© Richard Young

Catherine & Philip Mould

© Richard Young

Sir Roger’s sons, Geoffrey & Christian Moore, with their families

Prints & Multiples London Tuesday 12 December 3pm

David Hockney R.A. (British, born 1937) The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) – 19 February iPad drawing in colours, 2011, on wove paper Signed, dated and numbered 17/25 in pencil 140 x 105cm (55 x 41½in) Estimate: £80,000 - 120,000 ($100,000 - 150,000) Enquiries: Carolin von Massenbach +44 (0) 20 7393 3941 carolin.vonmassenbach@bonhams.com

NEWS

© David Hockney, Photo credit: Richard Schmid

T

Spring in his step After nearly four decades capturing California, and a decade spent creating scenes of Yorkshire, in 2018 David Hockney went on a road trip through Normandy – and fell in love with its lush landscape. “It’s unbelievably green.

Everywhere we look is green,” he enthused.

Moving there in 2019, he spent much of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 drawing views of the changing seasons on his iPad. “The spring of 2020 was marvellous in northern Europe…

and a lot of people noticed it, probably for the first time, because they were in one place.”

A year later, 116 of his spring drawings were displayed in a dedicated exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, and Hockney’s 80m-long frieze, recording a year’s worth of scenes of northern France, was hung at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. It is the artist’s largest painting to date. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a pair of 12m-long panoramas – depicting

summer and winter – were highlights of a show in Venice, California. An editioned print of the winter scene, Autour de la Maison, Hiver, will be offered by Bonhams in London in December’s Prints Sale, an opportunity to become part of the much-loved artist’s personal renaissance.

Enquiries: Jessie Bromovsky +44 (0) 20 7468 8212 jessie.bromovsky@bonhams.com

© Richard Woods/Hospitalrooms, Photo Credit: Tim Bowditch

© Julian Opie/Hospital Rooms, Photo credit: Tim Bowditch

Above left: Julian Opie (born 1958), Culottes, 2021.

Below: Hurvin Anderson (born 1965), Hinching Brook, 2022.

© Hurvin Anderson/Hospitalrooms, Photo credit: Tim Bowditch

Enquiries: Charles Dower +44 (0) 20 7393 3868 charles.dower@bonhams.com

© France-Lise McGurn/Hospitalrooms, Photo Credit: Tim Bowditch

O The time of his life It started with a breadknife and an old wristwatch.

At the age of five, George Daniels prised open his first timepiece – and was hooked. “It was like seeing the centre of the universe,” he recalled. “I wanted to spend the rest of my time with watches.” By the time he was 12, Daniels was repairing clocks for pocket money and, after serving in World War II, set up his own watch-cleaning and repair company. By the late 1960s, he had moved on to producing his own, making every single part by hand, from scratch. His invention of the coaxial escapement, which improved the performance of mechanical watches, is considered the most important horological development in the past 250 years. Today, however, Daniels could be the most significant watchmaker people have never heard of, due to the extreme rarity of his creations: he made only 37 watches in his lifetime (not including prototypes), each of which took some 2,500 hours of work. His brand, in collaboration with Roger W. Smith, made just 50 Milllenniums. One, a Daniels 18K gold Millennium Limited Series, will be making a rare appearance at the Fine Watches auction in London in December.

Top right: France-Lise McGurn (born 1983), Popular Goth, 2023.

Lower right: Richard Woods (born 1966), Tree Stump, Unique, 2023.

T Room to heal Arts and mental health charity Hospital Rooms returned to Bonhams New Bond Street with Hauser & Wirth gallery this September for its second annual charity auction. Across a twoweek online auction and a live evening auction, supporters – who included Iwan and Manuela Wirth – snapped up work by Martin Creed, Julian Opie, Hurvin Anderson and many other leading artists. The fundraiser raised a total of £430,000 – beating last year’s event by more than £100,000 – which will allow Hospital Rooms to continue commissioning creative workshops and art installations for NHS in-patient mental health units, at a time when funding is scarcer than ever. It’s a huge contribution to the partnership’s aim to raise £1 million over three years.

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Football: The Beautiful Game London 4 - 13 December From 12pm

Michael Bernard Critchlow (British, 1939-1953) Craven Cottage (detail) oil on board 91.5 x 61cm (36 x 24in) Estimate: £15,000 - 20,000 ($18,000 - 25,000) Enquiries: Christopher Dawson +44 (0) 20 7468 8296 christopher.dawson@bonhams.com

NEWS

O Classical education Now in its sixth edition, the twice-yearly auction series The Classics returns to London this winter with nine sales offering the finest in the classic arts.

From the Old Master Paintings sale on 6 December, there is a threepanelled screen with dancing classical figures. Attributed to the portrait painter George Romney, it is a very unusual early work by the artist, probably painted soon after he arrived in London in the early 1760s. Somehow, the screen made its way to Italy, where it was purchased by its current owner.

Princess Diane de Beavau de Craon & Guy Cuevas

Maryam Mahdavi

O

Also on 6 December, 500 Years of European Ceramics (including the British American Tobacco Collection) spans the 1500s to 1900s, though a large part of the sale is made up of 18th- to 19th-century Meissen and

Sèvres. The Sèvres bleucéleste ground ice cup, originally commissioned for Catherine the Great (estimate: £20,000-30,000), is a particular delight.

Eighties style A princess, a DJ and a fashion designer walk into an auction house – not a joke, just the guestlist for Bonhams’ party at Avenue Hoche in Paris to celebrate the ’80s auction.

In true decade of decadence spirit, cocktails and live music accompanied an exhibition of photographs of the era by Philippe Morillon.

Guests enjoyed a talk by Diane de BeauvauCraon, the rebel ‘Princess Bo-Bo’, who reminisced with Cuban musician Guy Cuevas about rubbing shoulders with Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger and Karl Lagerfeld. They then mingled with famous artists and singers, including fashion designer Paloma Picasso and actor-singers Karen Cheryl and Caroline Loeb. The evening’s heady excitement continued at the auction two days later, when several records were set – including the price achieved for a painting by street artist Futura 2000 – for a total of €789,965.

Isabelle Morizet aka Karen Cheryl & Arnaud Cornette de Saint Cyr Jakob Dupont & Sofia Osmani, Mayor of Lyngby

T

Launching Lyngby During six days in October, more than 5,000 people celebrated the opening of Bruun Rasmussen’s new auction house in Lyngby, 30 minutes north of Copenhagen. The festivities kicked off on Monday with speeches by Jakob Dupont, CEO of Bruun Rasmussen, and Sofia Osmani, Mayor of Lyngby, and continued through the week with regular guided tours and

talks by Bruun Rasmussen specialists – before reaching a crescendo on the Friday evening with revellers enjoying live music, drinks and canapés. The new auction house has 8,000 square metres of floorspace, spread across three floors, and brings Bruun Rasmussen’s separate offices in Nordhavn and Bredgade together under one roof.

Paloma Picasso & Caroline Loeb

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Old Master Paintings London Wednesday 6 December 2pm

Cornelis Schut (Antwerp 1597-1655) An Allegory of the Four Elements (detail) oil on canvas 155.5 x 251cm (61¼ x 98in) Estimate: £40,000 - 60,000 ($50,000 - 75,000) Enquiries: Lisa Greaves +44 (0) 20 7468 8325 lisa.greaves@bonhams.com

NEWS

O Pot luck

What happened next...

The ‘boys at play’ theme has been a constant in Chinese art since the 3rd century. Such depictions of small boys, frolicking in gardens or mountain landscapes, represented the desire to have many sons, as well as wealth, joy and happiness. The subject was particularly popular in the art of the Qing period, especially under the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, who featured it on numerous imperial vases – a wish come true, perhaps, as he went on to have 17 sons and 10 daughters. One magnificent blue-ground ‘boys at play’ vase bearing the Qianlong seal (estimate: €100,000-150,000) will be offered in Paris on 13 December. It is 72cm tall and bears two light-hearted scenes of boys playing with musical instruments and toys. Qianlong-era vases of this size and rich enamel decoration are very rare: the closest example is a pair of blue-ground famille rose vases now in the Royal Collection, possibly gifted by the Qianlong emperor to King George III in 1793.

Enquiries: Caroline Schulten +33 1 56 79 12 42 caroline.schulten@bonhams.com

On cloud nine

O Swiss celebration

Clockwise from above: Florence Bodmer-Liegme, Andrea Bodmer and Suzanne Bodmer-Feinmann; Brice Lechevalier, Katie Kennedy and André Bodson; Pierre-François Garcier, Désirée von Hohenlohe and Kateryna Ivanova; Laetitia Thétaz with her husband and Joy de Rouvre

Katie Kennedy and the team from Switzerland held a cocktail party – with partners Helvetia Insurance – in October to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Bonhams in Geneva.

Giacomo Balsamo, International Director of Post-War & Contemporary Art, travelled from Paris to give a talk on collections at Bonhams, then guests viewed a private exhibition of artworks from forthcoming auctions in London and New York, brought over specially for the evening to the Rue ÉtienneDumont office in Geneva’s old town.

Patrick Nagel’s Untitled soared past expectations to sell for €229,000 in Paris in September – a record for the artist in Europe.

Vintage year

The dedicated sale of Robert Colescott’s 1919 in New York in September attracted bids from around the world. It sold for $3.5 million to a leading American private collection.

Leading lady

Yoruba Woman in Blue

by Benedict Enwonwu sold for £686,200 in London in October, achieving nearly double its pre-sale high estimate.

O On the Roadster It was set to be a grim year. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 had marked the end of the Roaring Twenties and ushered in the worst economic depression in modern history, which would last close to a decade. But how could Cadillac have known this, when it unveiled its new supersized, ultra-luxury motor car, the Series 452 V-16, in January 1930? Costing ten times more than a 1930 Chevrolet, the Series 452 had the first true 16-cylinder engine (Bugatti and Maserati previously attempted this feat by bolting 8-cylinder engines together), which produced 185hp. Only 3,250 1930 Series 452 V-16s

were ever produced in all body styles, and only for the very wealthy. The most stylish and one of the rarest of them was the Roadster, which remains the most collectable in the series: one, sold by Bonhams in 2019, achieved nearly $1.2 million, while another is expected to make at least $1 million in the Scottsdale Auction in January 2024. Fewer than ten authentic Cadillac Series 452 V-16 Roadsters are thought to exist today.

Enquiries: Eric Minoff +1 917 206 1630 eric.minoff@bonhamscars.com

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Fine Watches

London Wednesday 13 December 2pm Cartier. A very rare and unusual 18K gold manual wind wristwatch Made as part of the Paris 1991 edition Estimate: £80,000 - 120,000 ($100,000 - 150,000) Enquiries: Charles Dower +44 (0) 20 7393 3868 charles.dower@bonhams.com

INSIDE BONHAMS

Inner worlds

For Charlie Thomas, embarking on a new valuation feels like discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb. He talks to Sasha Thomas

F

ew people even in Bonhams have quite as many stories as Charlie Thomas, Director of House Sales and Private & Iconic Collections. During the Bonhams sale of the contents of the Savoy in 2007, for instance, he “basically moved in” to the then empty hotel. Then in 2011 he went to St Lucia to value the contents of Lord Glenconner’s property. He had regular meetings with Sir Michael Caine during the sale of his personal collection in 2022 – “Michael and Shakira were wonderful,” he says. He’s rummaged around the attics at Chequers and Dunrobin, and, most recently, he’s been on the set of hit TV series The Crown.

“House Sales and Private & Iconic Collections are all about telling the story,” says Charlie. “It’s not necessarily about the individual objects – it’s more the story of how

Below A pair of Sir Michael Caine’s iconic glasses which sold for £16,500 in 2022

Above Charlie Thomas, Director of House Sales and Private & Iconic Collections

that object came into that collection.” He gives the example of spending time at Nicky Haslam’s Hunting Lodge when putting together Haslam’s sale in 2019. “I absolutely adored it, and Nicky was a joy to work with,” he says. “Everything had a story. It took so long, because you’d pick up a book and he’d say, ‘Oh, Andy Warhol gave me that,’ then you’d pick up a drawing and ‘Oh, that was done by Cecil Beaton’ or ‘David Hockney gave me that’ – it was just completely nuts and I loved it.”

It was Charlie’s love of history and storytelling that led him into the auction world, beginning his career as a porter at Bonhams Guildford. “The connection between art, antiques, and history is something you really get to feel with an auction house,” he stresses. “There’s such a fast turnover, and you get to handle so many amazing objects every day – and, with House Sales, you start by seeing them in all in someone’s home.” For Charlie, seeing objects in use is how it should be: “I love the practicality of antique furniture and I think it’s very important that antiques are used in everyday living – they exist to be used and enjoyed,” he says.

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INSIDE BONHAMS Left Daniel Quigley (Irish, active 18th Century), The Godolphin Arabian. Sold for £100,000 in the sale of The Contents of Glyn Cywarch in 2017

– can mean hidden treasure awaits the specialist. “You never know what you’re going to find,” says Charlie. “Every valuation has the potential for a Howard Carter moment.”

He remembers walking into a room at Lord Glenconner’s home in St Lucia to find a solid silver bed. He also recalls one of his personal highlights: finding a painting by Daniel Quigley entitled The Godolphin Arabian in the collection of Lord Harlech. “It had a certain brown hue over it from years of tobacco smoke, and went onto sell for £100,000. It had been protected by a layer of nicotine,” he jokes.

Exploring the attics and cellars of Dunrobin Castle in 2021 provided another opportunity for a big find, though not without complications. “There was no electricity, and we were in Scotland in the winter with limited daylight.

There was then the issue of getting everything down tight winding staircases.” Dunrobin’s forgotten treasures ended up achieving more than £700,000.

The Bonhams Network helps with certain logistical problems. “I’m one of the few people to work with almost everyone at Bonhams,” says Charlie. “Having a home team in almost every country is definitely one of our strengths, and just one area in which we’re getting only stronger.”

For Charlie, there is no single triumph he chooses to pinpoint across an impressive career so far (other than, as he is keen to emphasise, meeting his wife at Bonhams).

There have been simply too many impressive sales.

He could mention bringing the hammer down on the Sir Terence Conran collection in London in 2022, or the white-glove Jackie Colins sale in Los Angeles in 2017.

“I remember reading my first Jackie Colins novel the same year we sold Lord Harlech’s estate. I just thought it was bonkers to have such a brilliantly diverse year.” He stresses that his favourite part of his job is working with the families behind the collections. “It can be such a long process, often over a year from the initial valuation to the sale day, and you often end up becoming friends with the consigners.

That’s one of our real strengths, these relationships we

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Left A group of Bibendum and Michelin memorabilia from Sir Terence Conran - The Contents of Barton Court sale in 2022 Below Cash in the attic: Charlie visited Dunrobin Castle to value the contents of the attics and cellars in 2021

build. I often feel sad when an auction ends,” he says. But, of course, it has to be on to the next valuation.

The next sale for Charlie is the auction of the costumes, props and sets from the Netflix series The Crown. “Nothing like this has been done before, to sell basically a whole production,” says Charlie. He finds the process of putting together an auction to be much like making a film. “We’re effectively just like a production. The auction, just like a movie, lasts a few hours, but it’s the masses of work that goes on behind the scenes that makes it possible. Our cataloguers are our researchers, art-handlers are like our set designers, then we have press and marketing before the auctioneer takes centre stage on the day.” At this point in his career, Charlie certainly is an outstanding director.

Sasha Thomas is Senior Press Officer at Bonhams.

LOREM IPSUM

500 Years of European Ceramics including the British American Tobacco Collection of Eighteenth-Century Tobacco Containers and Accessories London Wednesday 6 December 2pm

A selection of 18th-century French Porcelain tobacco jars from the BAT Collection Estimates range from £1,500 - 12,000 ($1,800 - 15,000) Enquiries: Ghislaine Howard +44 (0) 20 7393 3825 ghislaine.howard@bonhams.com

Main image Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel (1883-1971) and Duke Falco di Verdura (1899-1978) in her rue Cambon apartment in 1937 Opposite A rare 1930s gemset and enamel ‘Maltese Cross’ cuff. Attributed to Verdura for Chanel. Originally owned by actress Helen Hayes MacArthur Estimate: $125,000 - 225,000 (£100,000 - 170,000)

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NEW YORK JEWELS

Off the cuff He was an impecunious duke. She was… well, Coco Chanel. Together they made era-defining jewellery, writes Vivienne Becker

Photo: © Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet

I

t’s one of the most famous jewels of the 20th century, a design icon that encapsulates a moment of creative collaboration, of cultural and artistic brilliance. But, perhaps most of all, it epitomises the style and spirit of a woman who was an architect of modern femininity. This tantalisingly rare Maltese cross cuff-bangle – offered by Bonhams in New York Jewels sale – was designed around 1935 by the charismatic Sicilian socialite-designer Fulco Santostefano della Cerda, Duke of Verdura (1898-1978), especially for ‘Coco’ Chanel (1883-1971).

This creation is indelibly associated with Chanel, who wore a pair of the bangles – one on each wrist – day and night, until they became her signature style. She wears them in photographs by Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst and Man Ray, in sketches by Christian Bérard and Cocteau.

Very few of the bangles were made at the time, but their enamel set with coloured gems would spark fashionable interpretations for decades to come.

Verdura was born to an eccentric aristocratic Sicilian family and grew up surrounded by the faded baroque splendour of the Palazzo Verdura in Palermo and the Villa Niscemi outside the city. When his father died in 1919, he took his inheritance and travelled across Europe, from Venice to Cannes and, on the advice of his new friends

Linda and Cole Porter in the 1920s, to Paris. There he found himself at the pulsating heart of high society, immersed in the wayward, restless creativity of a circle of brilliant artists, writers, musicians, poets, and fashion leaders, including Baba Faucigny-Lucinge and Natalia Paley.

As a young nobleman, he was not expected to work, but he was extravagant, spending the last of his inheritance on a Lady Hamilton-themed costume ball at the family palazzo. He needed a job. According to Patricia Corbett, in her book Verdura: The Life and Work of a Master Jeweler, Verdura was introduced to Chanel by his cousin Baron Ugo Oddo, although it’s likely their paths had already crossed in Venice. Chanel took him on as a fabric designer, one of several aristocrats – many of them Russian émigrés – she hired for specialist departments, handbags, perfume, embroidery and, in the case of Count Étienne de Beaumont, jewellery. It was said Chanel liked their wit, their contempt for luxury, their innate understanding of heritage. She certainly admired Verdura’s mordant wit, his cosmopolitan tastes, flair and style.

So impressed was Chanel with his work in the textile department, that she appointed him head of jewellery design after Étienne de Beaumont, with whom she’d fallen out. Here, Verdura was able to draw on his Bonhams Magazine

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NEW YORK JEWELS

favourite historical inspirations – sumptuous baroque ornamentation, elaborate heraldic motifs, the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, German mannerism. He conjured the majesty of the Merovingians, the richness of the Renaissance. Chanel and Verdura would work and travel together, studying treasures across Europe, whether the Cathedral Treasury at Aix-la-Chapelle or the Munich Schatzkammer and the Green Vault in Dresden.

It nurtured in Chanel a taste for extravagantly rich, antique-inspired jewels that ran counter to the rigorous and restrained tailoring of her clothes, but chimed with the growing collection of precious gifts bestowed on her by various lovers, particularly Grand Duke Dimitri and the Duke of Westminster: hefty gold chains and medallions, strings of gem beads, ropes of pearls, luscious rubies and emeralds, many of which she had re-set, some very probably into the celebrated cuffs.

Verdura and Chanel fused influences and inspirations, conjuring a distinctive, vibrant jewellery style of sumptuous yellow gold, richly gem-encrusted with pebble-like cabochon stones, set seemingly at random – jewels redolent of history, evoking royal and noble insignia. Verdura was especially fascinated by heraldic orders and medals, visiting the Musée de la Légion d’Honneur et des Ordres de Chevalerie, which opened in Paris in 1925, and then the 1929 exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale of objects relating to the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, whose defining symbol was the Maltese cross. In the 1930s, Verdura designed a series of Maltese cross brooches for Chanel, in sun-yellow gold, set with coloured gems.

Together, they reinvigorated jewellery, instigating an entirely new genre that injected voluptuousness and intense colour into the “great white silence” of pearls and diamonds and the frozen geometry of Art Deco. It was a style made thrillingly contemporary both by references to the so-called “barbarism” of medieval jewels (Byzantine, Visigoth, Merovingian) and by Chanel’s rule-breaking audacity in mixing precious and faux jewellery – the costume jewellery that she had popularised in the 1920s, challenging entrenched ideas of status and value.

In 1934, Verdura left Paris for the United States, to explore new possibilities – he worked for celebrity jeweller Paul Flato in Hollywood – but went back to Paris the following year, summoned by Chanel. It was at this time (according to Corbett) that Verdura and Chanel created

the signature cuff bangle, the pair owned and worn by Chanel herself, and a variation of the bangle offered now

by Bonhams. Soon after, Verdura returned to the States, establishing his own business in New York to became one of the most successful and influential designer-jewellers of the 20th century.

Just like Chanel’s own bangles, this cuff – of generous bombé silhouette – was made of silver, overlaid with translucent ivory enamel and ornamented with a Maltese cross studded with emerald cabochons, a central amethyst, aquamarines, sapphires, diamonds and rubies.

The gems are set as if at random, which is very much a signature of Verdura’s work with Chanel. The richness of the cross was inspired by the Byzantine mosaics at the church of San Vitale, Ravenna, depicting the Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora, both lavishly bejewelled. It seems very possible that the smooth enamel was an echo of the African bone bangles, worn by the armful

by Nancy Cunard, that became fashionable after the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris. Whatever the case, the combination of plainwhite, wide cuff with gemencrusted Maltese cross encapsulated the intriguing dualities of Chanel’s style, with restrained simplicity meeting opulence. Very few precious versions of the cuff were made.

This superb bangle – in pristine condition, still in its original box – has an impeccable provenance. It belonged to Helen Hayes MacArthur, ‘First Lady of American Theatre’ (1900-1993), having been bought for her by her husband directly from Chanel in Paris in the 1930s.

A child star, Helen Hayes MacArthur went on to have an impressive 82-year career, in Hollywood and on Broadway.

She was the first woman to win an EGOT – an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Award. The cuff is being sold by Helen’s descendants, offering opportunity to own a jewel that fuses modern fashion and ancient inspiration, that is imbued with the spirit of women who made history.

“Verdura spent the last of his inheritance on a costume ball at the family palazzo”

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Vivienne Becker is a jewellery historian and contributing editor to the Financial Times.

Sale: New York Jewels New York Monday 4 December Enquiries: Caroline Morrissey +1 212 644 9046 caroline.morrissey@bonhams.com

Photo: © Donation François Kollar. Ministère de la Culture (France), Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie, diffusion RMN-GP

Coco Chanel in her apartment at the Ritz, photographed by François Kollar in 1937. She was rarely seen without the ‘Maltese Cross’ cuff

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PRINTS

Driving force When speed-addicted Futurism met quirky British artists, the result was visionary linocuts from the Grosvenor School, says Mark Hudson Cyril Power (1872-1951) Speed Trial (Coppel CEP 31), c.1932 linocut printed in viridian, permanent blue and Chinese blue Estimate: £25,000 - 35,000 ($30,000 - 45,000)

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Above Cyril Power (1872-1951) The Tube Train (Coppel CEP 41), c.1934 linocut printed in yellow, red, light cobalt blue and dark blue Estimate: £30,000 - 50,000 ($40,000 - 65,000)

Right Sybil Andrews (1898-1992) Speedway (Coppel SA 29), 1934 linocut printed in raw sienna, Venetian red, permanent blue and Chinese blue Estimate: £40,000 - 60,000 ($50,000 - 80,000)

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ocated in a rambling Victorian house in the Pimlico area of London, the Grosvenor School of Modern Art functioned for only 15 years, from 1925 until 1940. It had no formal curriculum. Its premises – home of its founder, the Scottish printmaker Iain Macnab (1890-1967) – were large by domestic standards, but tiny for an academic institution. One of the students (of whom there can’t have been very many) also served as school secretary. Yet, despite the brevity of its existence, the Grosvenor was one of those art educational institutions that become synonymous with a particular approach and style, and in this case a particular medium: the linocut.

The giddily futuristic, brilliantly coloured prints of a small group of artists associated with the school, who became known, appropriately enough, as the Grosvenor School, were ignored for decades after their brief interwar heyday, before being rediscovered in the 1980s. They are now much sought after by collectors. An important group of Grosvenor School prints, featuring signature works by all the key figures (notably Claude Flight, Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power, but also Swiss artist Lill Tschudi and one of three intriguing Australian women from the school: Ethel Spowers) are being offered in Bonhams’ The Age of Speed – The Grosvenor School and the Avant-garde sale in London. It provides an opportunity to delve into a compelling, but still little understood byway of 20th-century British art.

Macnab, a wood engraver by training, was one of those distinctively British figures – Bernard Leach was another – with a passion to renew their craft in a modern

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context. In 1925, Macnab was joined by Claude Flight (1881-1955). Another, equally driven printmaker, Flight was on a mission, after abortive careers as an engineer and a farmer, to expand the creative possibilities of a medium that was then only some two decades old.

Patented in 1860 as a floor covering, linoleum was discovered in the early 20th century by German

“They combined speed-addicted Futurism with a distinctively English decorative sensibility” Expressionist and Russian Constructivist artists as a cheaper alternative to traditional woodcut printing. What the softer lino lacked in woodcut’s distinctive grain, it made up for in fluidity in mark-making and ease of use.

Flight, who had been a member of the radical abstract Seven and Five Group with Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, was excited by the possibility of creating modern art cheap enough for ordinary people, and which

PRINTS

Above Lill Tschudi (1911-2004) Rumba Band II, 1936 linocut printed in dark blue, red and orange beige Estimate: £3,000 - 5,000 ($4,000 - 6,500)

Right Cyril Power (1872-1951) Whence & Whither?, c.1930 linocut printed in Chinese orange, viridian, permanent blue and dark blue Estimate: £20,000 - 30,000 ($25,000 - 40,000)

being ‘necessarily small’ – linocuts can’t be too large – would work well in scaled-down modernist interiors.

Even more of an aesthetic spur was a comment made to Flight by F.B. Marinetti, Italian founder of the Futurist movement, when the pair met in London in 1912. Futurism was the first art movement to celebrate the frenetic pace and energy of modern urban life. Marinetti was impressed by the speed and efficiency of the London underground system, but bemused, as he noted to Flight, that British artists never even attempted to depict it. This clearly stuck in Flight’s mind, for when he began teaching at the Grosvenor School well over a decade later, he encouraged his students to tackle the machine-age dynamism of everyday life – not least the Tube – in images that combined the speed-addicted energy of classic Futurism with a distinctively English decorative sensibility.

Cyril Power (1872-1951) was older than Flight, at 53.

A trained architect, he had helped set up the Grosvenor School, but nonetheless took part in Flight’s printmaking classes, responding to his directive to take account of speed as “one of the psychologically important features of today”. Power’s densely patterned, curving perspectives through London Tube tunnels became his visual trademark. The sinister mask-like faces of the commuters facing each other across an underground carriage in The Tube Train (c.1934) feel particularly redolent of Italian Futurism, while the rhythmic patternmaking of the composition, with the newspapers and hand receding in even perspective, brings a dose of art deco – but of a peculiarly British kind.

Power’s vision of the dehumanised rush-hour commute is even more stark in Whence & Whither? (c.1930). Its identical, black-hatted figures descend an escalator in a rigidly patterned flow and in a range of colours – orange, blue, green and black – one can easily imagine transposed to British ceramics of the time. The resulting aesthetic brings to mind both the great Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni and the iconic art deco potter Clarice Cliff.

Power had formed a fruitful collaborative relationship with the considerably younger Sybil Andrews (1898-1992), who worked as the school’s secretary. The pair had met at Heatherley art school in Fulham after serving in the First World War: he in the Royal Flying Corps, she as a welder in aeroplane construction. That experience gave Andrews first-hand experience of machine methods and aesthetics. This fed into her powerful print Speedway (1934), in which three identical motorcyclists arranged in a decisive diagonal bear down on the viewer with unnerving momentum across a piece of paper measuring only some 9 by 13 inches.

Power and Andrews shared a studio and collaborated on a series of posters for the London transport authorities, under the name Andrews-Power, in which their individual Bonhams Magazine

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Left Claude Flight (1881-1955) Speed, c.1922 linocut printed in cobalt blue, yellow ochre, vermilion and Prussian blue Estimate: £8,000 - 12,000 ($10,000 - 16,000) Opposite Lill Tschudi (1911-2004) Fixing the Wires, 1932 linocut printed in black, greyish beige and light blue Estimate: £7,000 - 10,000 ($9,000 - 13,000)

contributions are difficult to pick apart. The swerving lines in Flight’s Speed (c.1922), meanwhile, showing shoppers and buses funnelled along the vertiginous chasm of Regent Street, compound the sense of the three artists fusing their artistic personalities in a moment of intense creative excitement.

The prints of Swiss artist Lill Tschudi (1911-2004), who was only 18 when she enrolled at the school, take a subtly different approach to the complexity of urban life.

The densely packed primary colours in her vibrant Rumba Band II (1936) were created, as in all Grosvenor prints, by applying each colour from a separately cut block, with overlaps between the blocks creating secondary hues and tones. The effect is to draw the eye towards the centre of the image, rather than projecting it outwards in the manner of Flight, Power and Andrews’s careering perspectives.

Women played a prominent role in the Grosvenor School, perhaps because linocut’s small scale and low cost felt more accessible than, say, monumental sculpture to artists struggling to find a place in a maledominated art world. And they often arrived via surprising routes. The Australian artist Eveline Syme (1888-1961), who had studied in Paris during travels in Europe in the early 1920s, came across Flight’s book Lino-Cuts in a Melbourne bookshop in 1928. Entranced by reproductions of Grosvenor prints, Syme was convinced there was enough that was completely “new and different” in these images to justify setting sail for London to enrol on Flight’s course. She and her friend and fellow artist Ethel Spowers were surprised to find another Australian artist, Dorrit Black, already on the course. All three of them quickly

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fell under Flight’s spell. He was, Syme noted, “so full of enthusiasm for his subject, and his ideas are so clear and reasoned that it is impossible for his students not to be influenced by them.”

All these artists contributed to a series of highly successful exhibitions, first at London’s Redfern Gallery, then in the United States, China, Australia and Canada.

“The three artists are fusing their artistic personalities in a moment of intense creative excitement” Yet, by the mid-1930s, the Grosvenor star had already begun to wane. Flight died a forgotten figure in 1955. The late 20th century saw a revival of interest in all things Modernist, but it took some time for awareness to build around the Grosvenor School’s quintessentially English Deco-Modernism. Yet Flight and friends’ vibrant linocut prints are now regarded as iconic, and are among the most accessible and readily enjoyable works of the early 20th-century British avant-garde.

Mark Hudson is the art critic of The Independent.

Sale: The Age of Speed – The Grosvenor School and the Avant-garde London Tuesday 12 December at 11am Enquiries: Suzanne Irvine +44 (0) 20 7468 8294 suzanne.irvine@bonhams.com

Battle of the sexes William Waldorf Astor fell in love with Pompeii – and then with a rundown castle in Kent. So only a Classical masterpiece would do for his garden, says Susan Moore

The Hever Nymph and Satyr Roman marble group of a nymph and satyr, c.2nd century AD 71cm high incl base Estimate: £700,000 - 1,000,000 ($900,000 - 1,300,000)

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Photo: © Hever Castle & Gardens

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atyrs are invariably priapic. Representations of these insatiable woodland deities, part man, part beast, first proliferated during the 3rd century BC in response to the growing cult of Dionysus, Greek god of wine and all its associated pleasures. For the Romans, these hybrid creatures were men with the ears, tail, legs and horns of a goat. Sometimes grotesque or foolishly befuddled by wine, often lithe and handsome, they were almost always in pursuit of nymphs – nature spirits who took the form of lovely young women desired by gods and mortals alike. Once in a while, they caught them.

A famous 2nd-century Roman marble group of one such encounter, probably based on a Hellenistic original, survives near complete in only three versions. One is in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, another among the Townley Marbles in the British Museum. The third, acquired before 1905 by the phenomenally wealthy American, William Waldorf Astor, later Viscount Astor of Hever, is offered by Bonhams in the Antiquities sale in December. All three are almost identical – except, tellingly, for the position and expressions of the heads. These crucial differences allow for dramatically different interpretations of the scene and its outcome.

Not all the heads are originals. That of the Capitoline nymph is missing, those of the other two nymphs are later replacements, as is the head of the Hever satyr.

While these Hever heads are believed to be 16th-century restorations, the Townley nymph is known to have been restored in Rome in the 18th century by the sculptor Giovanni Pierantoni, known as ‘Il Sposino’, chief restorer of antiquities in the Vatican. How these sculptors, ancient and modern, dealt with their subject is fascinating.

Above Hever Castle, childhood home of Anne Boleyn and later William Waldorf Astor’s place of residence

What we see, incontrovertibly, is a tussle. The muscular young satyr has grabbed the nymph around the waist, pulled her down and pinned her between his thighs. He is visibly aroused – as she has good reason to be aware.

Surprised, she turns towards her assailant, attempting to dislodge his grip under her breast with one hand and, grasping a clump of his hair with the fingers of the other, to lever herself up by pushing against his forehead.

There is no mistaking the rebutted satyr’s pain in the Capitoline version, the traditionally snub-nosed deity grimacing, eyes closed. Sadly, we have no idea of his nymph’s response. He looks marginally less beleaguered in the Townley group, and in the Renaissance-period Hever head – more human, more handsome, albeit with goat-like pointed ears – he looks at her with an expression more of pleasure and anticipation. The unhappy nymph here, her brow slightly furrowed, is not looking at him but upwards, as if pleading for divine intervention. Coolly classical, her expression is more histrionic and stylised than naturalistic.

A quite different dynamic is offered by the Townley group. Here, the distinctly 18th-century nymph turns back towards her assailant looking almost amused and indulgent, a half-smile playing on her lips. This nymph may not be unamenable to his advances. At the very least, she dismisses them as the usual kind of satyr antics and appears to feel herself not unduly threatened.

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Photo: © Hever Castle & Gardens

Above Loggia from the Italian gardens at Hever Castle

runs throughout the art of the Classical world. The ambiguities inherent in these three nymph and satyr groups perhaps tell us as much about the mores and tastes of the periods in which these sculptures were restored as those of the Greek and Roman worlds which produced them. The response they generate in the #MeToo generation similarly will speak volumes about ours.

That nymphs, satyrs and their like were not human lent a cloak of respectability to the viewing of images of nudity and sexual violence in the modern, Judaeo-Christian era, just as it gave licence to the fertile imaginations – and sexual fantasies – of artists from the Renaissance onwards, from Parmigianino in the 16th century via Fuseli to Picasso in the 20th century. The uninhibited ancients had no concept of sins of the flesh, or of sex as justified only as a means of procreation. Sex was a natural part of all aspects of their life – and representations are often more ribald and comedic than erotic. The Romans who copied and adapted Greek figure groups such as this put them in their gardens for all to see. So did the wealthy collectors who claimed them after their rediscovery. William Waldorf Astor was no exception.

Astor acquired his marble from the renowned Florentine antiquarian, collector and dealer Stefano Bardini, supplier to many of the world’s most important museums and wealthiest collectors. Unusually, Bardini meticulously recorded the thousands of works of art that passed through his hands using the new technology of photography.

His photographic archive, only discovered during the renovation of the Museo Bardini in 1975 and 1976, includes this group. Nothing is known of the earlier history of the sculpture, although its restorations have been compared

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to the work of Giovanni Bandini and Domenico Poggini, assistants to the successful 16th-century Florentine sculptor Baccio Bandinelli.

Astor’s education by private tutors in Germany and Italy marked his life. It inspired an interest in Greek philosophy and a passion for Italy. In 1882, he was appointed the equivalent of the American ambassador to Italy and promptly rented the Palazzo PallaviciniRospigliosi in Rome, with its garden nymphaeum of grottoes and river gods. Interest turned into something

“That nymphs, satyrs and their like were not human lent a cloak of respectability to the viewing of images of nudity” like obsession after he visited the hauntingly beautiful city of Pompeii, frozen in time after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 poignantly preserved its buildings, artefacts and citizens almost intact. It seems as though Astor wanted to recreate the spirit of the place, or his feelings for it, in his various residences. Gathering huge quantities of antiquities from Attilio Simonetti in Rome and Bardini in Florence, he sent them to the Villa Astor near Sorrento, and to his two English country houses, Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire and Hever Castle in Kent. Perhaps his only real rivals as collectors were J. Pierpont Morgan and William Randolph Hearst.

Photo: © Hever Castle & Gardens

ANTIQUITIES

Above Portrait of William Waldorf Astor (1848-1919), First Viscount Astor

Below The Hever Nymph and Satyr on the grounds of Hever Castle

It was at Hever Castle that the Nymph and Satyr found their resting place for some 80 years. The home of two of Henry VIII’s wives, the medieval moated house was romantic but neglected. Astor bought it in 1903, four years after a family feud persuaded him to become a British citizen. He spent another fortune restoring the place, building additional accommodation and an Italian Garden with loggia, fountains, cascades and grottoes, complete with a 38-acre lake that took around 800 labourers some two years to dig out of marshland by hand. This was the Edwardian pleasure garden par excellence, with some 15 acres of Classical and natural landscapes constructed and planted.

Beloved Pompeii was not forgotten. The Pompeiian Wall was built here to show marble and stone antiquities arranged in intimate small bays. The Nymph and Satyr was part of this sylvan setting, which expressed the Classical concept of a locus amoenus or pleasant, shady place, an idyllic spot for sensual being. Astor was well aware of the explicitly erotic subject-matter of the infamous frescoes and sculptures in the House of the Vettii in Pompeii. It is a place with many an erect phallus, not least those of Priapus, god of fertility and abundance. In contrast, this more discreetly tumescent marble satyr appears the very model of decorum.

Susan Moore writes for the Financial Times among other publications.

Sale: Antiquities London Thursday 7 December at 2pm Enquiries: Francesca Hickin +44 (0) 20 7468 8226 francesca.hickin@bonhams.com

Photo: © Hever Castle & Gardens

Left The Pompeiian Wall in the Italian Gardens at Hever Castle, former home to The Hever Nymph and Satyr

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The multi-award-winning TV series, The Crown has enthralled us for six seasons. In February, Bonhams is holding a sale of the show’s props and costumes. Philippa Stockley goes behind-thescenes to talk to the makers about how it was created XX

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© Netflix 2020, Inc.

A crowning achievement

THE CROWN AUCTION Opposite Green gown featured in promotional posters Season 2 Episode 1 and Episode 4 Estimate: £3,000 - 5,000 ($4,000 - 6,500)

© Netflix 2020, Inc.

Above Coronation ordaining dress, gold mantle, red cloak Season 1 Episode 5 A replica of the coronation garments designed for and worn

by Claire Foy (as the Queen) Estimate: £20,000 - 30,000 ($25,000 - 40,000)

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veryone knows the delicious feeling of being so spellbound by a film that, for a while afterwards, our own world jars. Colours look insipid, people’s clothes seem odd. One longs to dive back in.

That’s when the magic has worked, that’s the prize. And jewel-bright, often gilded, and frequently as beautiful as a tank of tropical fish sashaying past our feasting eyes: that is The Crown, hundreds of whose costumes and props will be offered by Bonhams in The Crown Auction in February.

This visually stunning series views like a photograph of British history across decades and continents coming to life, but interwoven with the searing agony of palpable emotions and scalding heartbreak.

In some films, the settings can seem a bit sparse or ad hoc. Things wobble that shouldn’t. But not once in The Crown. Clothes, voices, places, rooms, and things – thousands of things high and low, from chairs, beds, tables, paintings, prams, pianos and polo sticks; down to cups, china corgis, decanters, wicker dog baskets; then bunting, binoculars, a bespoke barbecue (designed by Prince Philip with folding legs to go in the

back of a Land Rover) – all feel right. Set Decorator Alison Harvey recalls the endless things she sourced online or bought elsewhere, or had made, season by season, to achieve this verisimilitude – “I even bought a bag of rust,” she says. And, set among all the things that counterpoint daily life, are stories known and new that ring completely true. They sing.

How was such authenticity achieved? Most of us thought we knew at least some of this story that twines through our own, because we had been there, or watched it on TV, or read about it, sometimes decades ago. But we also knew that much more went on behind closed, gilded, doors and glittering palace façades; within highwalled gardens; private jets, ships, and cars. How was this chronicle of British life, stretching from the early 1950s to easily within living memory, made so utterly believable?

Because viewing figures for the six seasons of the multiple-award-winning show demonstrate that we do believe it. Some would even say they learned more about the period than at school, and in a much more appealing way. Viewers in 88 countries watched Netflix’s Bonhams Magazine

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© Netflix 2020, Inc.

“We knew that much more went on behind closed, gilded, doors and glittering palace façades; within… private jets, ships, and cars” smash production, made by Left Bank Pictures in glamorous locations including private country houses and estates, but also, in very large part, at Elstree Studios, a 15-minute train-hop north from London, behind a pair of unremarkable gates next to a Tesco superstore in Hertfordshire – Elstree, where Alfred Hitchcock made the first British talkie in 1929.

Andy Harries, who set up Left Bank Pictures in 2007, worked with the brilliant writer and creator Peter Morgan and the fêted Stephen Daldry, the director for the first season. They knew early on they had a massive success on their hands. “The writing is extraordinary and compulsive; the characters are incredibly believable, rooted in a reality researched in unbelievable detail by eight researchers. It’s done with enormous passion. I always felt we were doing something really good – and the rushes were extraordinary. I had a strong sense then that it would succeed, but one didn’t know then what Netflix would become. When we began, Netflix wasn’t yet global.

But at the Golden Globes [for Season 1 in 2017], we got an amazing reaction.”

Then there’s the settings. Take Buckingham Palace.

That stately double staircase on which revelatory

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moments occur; the Queen’s bedroom enfiladed with Prince Philip’s, scene of so many tender, prosaic or angry private moments; the private Audience Room with its yellow-upholstered mahogany chairs and canapé, and the bell the Queen presses when she’s had enough of the prime minister of the moment; the Picture Gallery down which Princess Margaret storms, unaware she’s about to be forbidden Peter Townsend. Surely all real. But no: location; standing set; location; location. What of the ship Britannia, inside and out? “Not a real ship,” Gene D’Cruze, Head of Construction, says with satisfaction.

Surely, the inside of the royal jets? No again. A jet section was in gigantic Stage 5 the entire time, its interior dressed, stripped and dressed again by Harvey and her team.

The sets segue so perfectly with real doorways in real houses that one simply cannot see the joins.

THE CROWN AUCTION

My favourite lot

© Netflix 2020, Inc.

A right royal occasion: let the people who actually made The Crown guide us to the finest of the show’s extraordinary props and costumes.

Opposite Powder blue ballgown, worn with fur stole in the promo poster Season 1 Episode 5 Estimate: £5,000 - 7,000 ($6,500 - 9,000) Right The ‘Revenge dress’, off-theshoulder black cocktail dress Season 5 Episode 5 Estimate: £8,000 - 12,000 ($10,000 - 16,000)

Andy Harries OBE CEO Left Bank Pictures and Executive Producer of The Crown The Gold State Coach Estimate: £30,000 - 50,000 The Crown sprang from the play The Audience (2013), written by Peter Morgan – we’d first made The Queen (2006) with Helen Mirren. We wanted to make something special, and Netflix had the money, ambition and ability to go the whole hog. The Gold State Coach is fabulous, isn’t it? I’d like to own it myself; it’s a work of art.

Georgina Brown Commercial Manager Left Bank Pictures (Series 3-6) Set models and drawings The Crown is set apart by its scale, ambition, detail, expertise and skill. There are several 3D set-models. The Downing Street one includes the hallway where Churchill has his 80th birthday party, with the staircase with portraits of past prime ministers, while the Kensington Palace kitchen has a round window that became a motif for Diana emotionally: it looks as if it has cross-hairs, a sort of target.

Gene D’Cruze Head of Construction 10 Downing Street façade Estimate: £20,000 - 30,000 I’ve built every single set on every

series – more than 1,000 of them– and employed 140 people. It’s all done old-school. I’ve done 80 TV series, but The Crown is the best – best production, best art department, best locations, best series, best people. I especially love the 10 Downing Street façade.

Most sets only last six months but this stood for seven years.

Alison Harvey MBE Set Decorator (all seasons) Queen Mother’s drinks set, hankies and swizzle stick Estimate: £60 - 80 I came in as a freelance for two weeks and stayed seven years.

At one point I was dressing 12 sets a week – find it, prep it, dress it, film it, out. The Queen Mother was quite mischievous and naughty. One of her valets described her as a “devoted drinker”: Dubonnet and gin before lunch, wine during; Martini before dinner, and Champagne with.

The swizzle stick, with its little spokes, sums up her mischievous ’30s era.

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Below left Cream and Gold Jacquard Gown worn by Claire Foy (as the Queen) Season 2 Episode 3 Estimate: £5,000 - 7,000 ($6,500 - 9,000)

Below Jonathan Pryce’s (as Prince Philip) desk – a French early 20th-century mahogany and gilt-metal mounted pedestal desk Estimate: £3,000 - 5,000 ($4,000 - 6,500) Opposite Lia Williams (as Wallis Simpson) – grey and black sequin column ballgown Season 1 Episode 5 Estimate: £1,500 - 2,000 ($2,000 - 2,500)

© Netflix 2020, Inc.

“Even the utterly believable front of 10 Downing Street… was a standing set. All it lacks is a cat” Actors appear to flow between them. Even the utterly believable front of 10 Downing Street, with its railings and twin boot-scrapers, was a standing set in the back lot (along with the exterior of the Ritz and of Buckingham Palace). It was redesigned three times as it changed over time. All it lacks is a cat.

Pinch yourself and accept that no filming whatsoever was done inside the Palace. Other grand houses (some arguably grander than the palace that Jackie Kennedy notoriously found rather tired) stood in, Wilton House in Wiltshire and Lancaster House in London among them.

The rest was designed, prefabricated, and put up and down as required, always at speed. Even sentry boxes, and the Palace’s familiar glazed porte-cochère – all prefab. And Queen Elizabeth II’s stunningly realistic

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coronation in Westminster Cathedral was Ely Cathedral, Pinewood Studios and a reproduction throne.

On the crucial role that things play, Harvey explains that, although so much of royal life is shut off from us, royal desks often appear on television or in photos. From these, she gleaned many of the personal touches that we all gather around us, from pens to ornaments. Desk telephones also kept pace with change, from early Bakelite to angular ’70s models and beyond. Harvey stresses the importance of getting tech right, along with the endless cavalcade of lamps. As for the chintz-with-a-twist style that characterises Princess Diana’s ’80s apartment, she says, “I think we’ve been partly responsible for the frilly cushion comeback.”

Profuse and continual research is the key, with attention to detail setting The Crown apart from any series ever made. It’s the thing everyone mentions, too, from carpenters to continuity supervisors – the huge, often unsung team that ensures the magic happens.

Head of Research Annie Sulzberger has worked on The Crown since before its 2013 pitch. From a small team researching everything, the number soon grew. Five people worked full-time on each episode – using a library that swelled to 800 books, along with databases – and were supported by newspaper archivists, specialists, and

THE CROWN AUCTION

© Netflix 2020, Inc.

Michele Clapton Costume Designer (Series 1) ‘Piano dress’ worn by Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret Estimate: £1,000 - 2,000 I tried to be witty with Margaret, using brutalist prints, unusual cuts, clever colours, pockets in ball gowns. Margaret had so much time to think and consider her look.

She wears the low-cut silk-chiffon piano dress in such an intimate duet between her and her father, the King, that for a moment it’s uncomfortable to watch. Then the camera pans round and you see their guests, and it’s OK.

Below Two Beswick models of corgis, with a framed photograph (and other corgi-related photographs and props) Estimate: £200 - 300 ($250 - 375)

an etiquette adviser. Her department produced timelines and character development, and made a visual “bible” of, say, cars driven by Princess Anne. In order to gain permission to use a newspaper’s masthead to reproduce a front page for just one shot, the entire page might have to be rewritten, then mocked up by the art department (which also created letters, diaries and speeches – each one looking genuine on screen).

“On Series 1, I had to bone up on all things horsey, which screwed up my YouTube algorithm,” Sulzberger jokes. “I’ve been a researcher since 2006, but I’ve never known a production to care this much, which really comes down to Peter [Morgan]. He was always keen to expand research.

Amy Roberts Head Costume Designer (Series 3-6) Sidonie Roberts Assistant Designer Nun’s habit worn by Jane Lapotaire as Princess Alice of Battenberg Estimate: £500 - 700 We have about 40 people: designers, pattern cutters, a military department, tailleurs, and about 13 makers. There’s even a crowd department – and everyone is fitted. Margaret first appears swinging across a courtyard in an ivory and aubergine caftan.

The way it moves, and the anger in the print, sums her up. We use huge mood boards, books, magazines, paintings. Princess Alice of Battenburg wears a grey linen habit. In this fantastic opera of characters in silks and colours, there’s this extraordinary woman no one knows much about.

Amy Diamond Action-props buyer (Series 5-6) A Scottish horn and hazel walking cane Estimate: £200 - 300 Action props are all those handled by actors in a scene. Each principal actor has a plastic prop box.

Harold Wilson was particular about pipes. Princess Margaret liked cigarette holders. We had a good stock of binoculars and cameras.

We laid out tables with plenty of choice next to a shoot. The Queen used a Parker pen; Prince Charles a Mont Blanc. Such attention is a constant on The Crown. Prince Charles (Dominic West) liked long country walking sticks and shepherd’s crooks – and I tracked down a similar crook to one the real prince had used.

Carrie Banner Supervising Production Manager Reproduction of Coronation Chair (St Edward’s Chair) Estimate: £10,000 - 20,000 The production office is the engine room; I have a great team of 24, and with such a team you can achieve almost anything. The Crown has two units shooting concurrently, for 30 weeks, as far apart as Barcelona and Hull on a single day, involving hundreds of people, while we’re also doing recce on locations, and casting and editing. It’s a military-style operation. We shot the coronation scene early on, at Pinewood.

The chair was the centrepiece.

It dawned on me that the show had gained this great importance: to show the anointing, under the canopy, which the public never saw, is the magic of film-making.

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Left Helena Bonham Carter’s (as Princess Margaret) Guildhall banquet gown, also featured in promotional content Season 3 Episode 9 Estimate: £2,000 - 3,000 ($2,500 - 4,000)

© Netflix 2020, Inc.

Below Suite of luggage belonging to Lesley Manville (as Princess Margaret) Estimate: £1,000 - 1,500 ($1,500 - 2,000)

Right Vanessa Kirby’s (as Princess Margaret) wedding dress, veil, shoes and bouquet Season 2 Episode 7 Estimate: £6,000 - 8,000 ($8,000 - 10,000)

“The Crown never followed one historian’s vision; it followed as many as we could find.” Which in turn uncovered fresh aspects of story or plot. “When Jackie Kennedy said the Palace was tired, and the Queen rather frumpy, we found that in Cecil Beaton’s diaries – which were extraordinary.

“It’s the depth of the series that makes it popular.

Texture, care, production values. People love worldbuilding. I don’t think it’s escapism – this really feels layered. It’s complex. It feels worth your hour.”

For many, it was the glorious costumes that made The Crown – with reason, for they are wonderfully designed, beautifully made, and each tailored to their occupant. The dramatic, sexy, chic gowns worn by Lia Williams’ Duchess of Windsor are tiny (the real duchess was whip-thin and petite, too). It would be a joy to own any of the many – so many – boned, beaded or draped ’50s-skirted dresses, wide and narrow, worn by Claire Foy’s Queen and Vanessa Kirby’s Margaret, while Helena Bonham Carter’s dazzling and often gloriously rebellious outfits for the later Margaret are one long regal scream.

Associate Costume Designer Sidonie Roberts created some of the silks when she had unexpected time during lockdown, making those items even more unique.

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“Princess Diana’s clothes are more emotionally attached to her story than those of any other character” While ’70s clothing might not be to everyone’s taste, Olivia Colman’s Trooping the Colour uniform for the Queen is painstakingly observed, as were an array of interesting garments – especially hats. Colman’s silk investiture ensemble is about as far as one could imagine, stylistically, from the lime-green investiture outfit and faux-feathered cartwheel hat worn by Marion Bailey’s Queen Mother, but both are very faithful.

Men in The Crown enjoy great clothes as well, such as Josh O’Connor’s engagement suit (as Prince of Wales), along with country clothes and tailored uniforms.

Wedding and coronation garments are obvious highlights, but, because of the quality of design, fabric, and tailoring, even daywear items feel like part of the fabric of history.

Princess Diana’s clothes are somehow more emotionally attached to her story than those of any other character. Her well-known jumpers (recreated) are

© Netflix 2020, Inc.

THE CROWN AUCTION

Above Engagement announcement blue ensemble with pussybow blouse Season 4 Episode 3 Estimate: £1,500 - 2,000 ($2,000 - 2,500)

Right A mahogany bureau cabinet in the George III Rococo style, together with the porcelain figures, photograph frames, desk accessories and letters Estimate: £3,000 - 5,000 ($4,000 - 6,500)

Below right Promotional image for Season 6, honouring the legacy of The Crown Below left Emma Corrin (as Lady Diana) engagement ring Season 4 Episode 3 Estimate: £2,000 - 3,000 ($2,500-4,000)

unexpectedly poignant; her ‘Wayne Sleep’ ballet dress speaks volumes, as does the black, so-called ‘Revenge dress’. In between, she wore many other very pretty day dresses. Perhaps, of all of them, her faun outfit, when she first met Prince Charles and dodged and hid behind plants, gives one pause. So delicate, so other-worldly.

It’s things like this – memorable, striking, and imbued with layers of recollected meaning – that are likely to turn this last hurrah of the props and costumes of The Crown into a very loud roar.

Philippa Stockley’s novels include Black Lily and A Factory of Cunning.

© Netflix 2020, Inc.

Sale: The Crown Auction London Wednesday 7 February at 4pm Online auction: 30 January - 8 February Enquiries: Charlie Thomas +44 (0) 20 7468 8358 charlie.thomas@bonhams.com Proceeds from the live auction will go towards setting up Left Bank Pictures’ The Crown Scholarship Programme – for the National Film and TV School. All six seasons of The Crown are available to view on Netflix from 14 December.

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THE HARTMAN COLLECTION Main image Paul Signac (1863-1935) Sisteron, 1902 oil on canvas 89.5 x 116.5cm (35¼ x 45⅞in) Estimate: $4,000,000 - 6,000,000 (£3,000,000 - 4,500,000)

Joining the dots

Gauguin told him off for copying, but he didn’t know Paul Signac would go on to forge an art movement admired

by Van Gogh and Matisse, writes Alastair Smart

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ged 15, the budding artist Paul Signac headed with eagerness to see the fourth Impressionist exhibition at 28 Avenue de l’Opéra, in Paris. It was the spring of 1879. Once inside, he began sketching from a work by Degas that impressed him. It wasn’t long, however, before he was tapped forcefully on the shoulder by Paul Gauguin and unceremoniously ejected from the building. “One does not copy here, monsieur,” Gauguin said.

Thankfully, Signac wasn’t put off art for life. In fact, as the leader – alongside Georges Seurat – of the movement known as Neo-Impressionism, he went on to become one of the most important artists around the turn of the 20th century. Not just because of his paintings, highly impressive though many of them are, but because of his role as a theorist (who counted Henri Matisse among his disciples) and a trendsetter (who co-founded the Salon des Indépendants). More on all of which shortly.

Signac was born in Paris in 1863 into a family who ran a successful chain of saddler’s shops – they counted Emperor Napoleon III among their clientele. His parents wanted him to become an architect, but Signac was intent on art. He trained briefly – and, in his view, Bonhams Magazine

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unsatisfactorily – in the atelier of Émile Bin, a painter renowned for his mythological scenes. Signac took an early liking to the Impressionists and was struck by what he called the “revolutionary nature” of a Monet exhibition he saw in 1880. Several months later, he felt compelled to write the senior artist a letter saying, “My only models have been your works. I’ve been following the wonderful path you broke for us.”

Monet did eventually reply, but not until May 1884, by which time Signac was in the thick of launching the Salon des Indépendants. The aim was to create an annual exhibition that broke free from the constraints of the government-sponsored official Salon, whose jury rejected any submission deemed in the slightest bit progressive. One of the founding members alongside Signac was Seurat, and the pair would become friends and close collaborators in the years ahead.

They had very different personalities – Signac ebullient, Seurat taciturn. However, they aligned artistically. Inspired by recent theories on optics and colour perception by the likes of the chemist MichelEugène Chevreul, they sought to take painting forward by imposing rational order on the Impressionists’ ostensibly haphazard impressions of colour and light.

This meant fastidiously building up canvases through

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the application of dots of unmixed colour in a stippling effect. The result was a dazzling yet carefully planned play of complementary and contrasting hues. The colours would blend together in the viewer’s eye from a distance rather than on the painter’s palette – and be

“They were very different – Signac ebullient, Seurat taciturn.

However, they aligned artistically” all the purer and more intense for that.

The Salon des Indépendants provided a perfect platform for Seurat and Signac’s work. In 1886, the art critic Félix Fénéon coined the term ‘Neo-Impressionism’ to describe their paintings – the most famous example of which being Seurat’s masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. (The duo’s technique has often been referred to as ‘pointillist’, but Signac never liked that label.)

Neo-Impressionism was soon the art movement du jour. Camille Pissarro, the erstwhile Impressionist, proved a high-profile convert. Numerous others

Photo: © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Photo: © 2023 Archives Signac, Paris

THE HARTMAN COLLECTION

Opposite Georges Seurat’s Seascape at Port-en-Bessin, Normandy (1888), at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Left Paul Signac in his studio in around 1930

followed, including Théo van Rysselberghe and a large circle of Belgian artists known as Les XX. Vincent van Gogh, though lacking the rigour to embrace Neo-Impressionism himself, heaped praise on its “fresh revelation of colour”.

In 1887, while the Dutchman was living in Paris, he and Signac became friends, and took regular painting trips together on the banks of the Seine. They stayed in touch when van Gogh moved south to Arles, and Signac visited his pal in hospital in 1889 after he had severed his ear. (The following year, the Frenchman also came close to having a duel with the Symbolist painter Henry de Groux, when the latter called Van Gogh’s work “abominable” and refused to show in a group exhibition with him.)

Van Gogh died in July 1890, and Signac suffered an even greater blow eight months later when Seurat passed away suddenly, aged 31. As Pissarro observed in a letter to his son after attending the funeral, “I saw Signac most upset by this misfortune. I think… pointillism is finished”.

Seeking a change of scene, Signac set sail from Brittany on a boat he owned, bound for the south of France. By chance, he discovered the tiny fishing port of St Tropez on the Côte d’Azur, then anything

Top Signac’s Les Andelys, Matin, Été (1923) Above The catalogue cover for Signac’s 1904 exhibition at Galerie Druet in Paris

but the chic tourist hotspot it has since become.

The place was a revelation to him. “I am awash with joy,” Signac wrote to his mother shortly after arriving.

“Before the golden shores of the bay, blue waves finish their course on a small beach… I have everything I need to work with for my whole life.”

Signac also revelled in the brilliant Mediterranean light. Not yet 30, he was to spend his remaining decades living between St Tropez and Paris. Typically, he would spend summers in the former, based in a villa he bought there called La Hune. So taken was Signac by the Côte d’Azur that he even came to see it as the ideal location for a utopian society of the future. He made this explicit in a huge painting called In the Time of Harmony: the Golden Age has not Passed, It is Still to Come (1893-5), which depicts a sunlit arcadia by the Mediterranean coast, where people find a harmonious balance between work and leisure.

Some pick figs, others dance or play boules, with not a hint of the industrialisation that marked 19th-century life and landscapes in northern France.

Signac was never an explicitly political artist, though.

In the main, his pictorial responses to St Tropez and the surrounding area were seascapes and landscapes. In November 1902, he took a five-day cycling trip inland, Bonhams Magazine

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creating watercolours at eye-catching spots. Among them was the ancient town of Sisteron, situated in a narrow gorge on the River Durance. Signac painted a large canvas of it back in the studio, based on one of his watercolours, and in December this work is being offered in the sale dedicated to The Alan and Simone Hartman Collection at Bonhams New York.

Sisteron portrays two cliffs connected by a bridge, under which the river flows. The town is located at bridge level on the cliff on the left, overlooked by a citadel some 500 metres up.

The rocky landscape is bathed in autumnal light at the approach of sunset. Signac shows his mastery of the harmonious gradation of colours, from warm ones to cool ones and back again, depending on the amount of sunshine hitting a given area. The picture is similar to the Neo-Impressionist paintings from earlier in his career. However, it reveals too the fondness that Signac developed through the 1890s for slightly looser, larger brushstrokes. These resemble irregular blocks more than methodical dots, and the result was a modest move towards abstraction – or “compositional simplification”, as he called it.

Such a move allowed the artist to heighten the effects of his colours, whose decorative qualities

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he increasingly privileged over their descriptive ones.

Sisteron gives ample proof that Pissarro was wrong: far from dying with Seurat, Neo-Impressionism took on new life in Signac’s sole hands after he had encountered the Côte d’Azur.

“Sisteron gives proof that Pissarro was wrong: far from dying with Seurat, Neo-Impressionism took on new life in Signac’s sole hands ” The artist set out a manifesto for the movement in his 1899 book, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme, which explained it as a stage in the natural evolution of French painting onwards from the early 19thcentury artist Eugène Delacroix. Three keen readers were Henri Matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, all of whom went to stay with Signac in St Tropez in the summer of 1904. Absorbing his lessons about the application of pure colour, this trio would before long spearhead the Fauvist movement. Matisse actually painted his proto-Fauve masterpiece Luxe,

THE HARTMAN COLLECTION

Opposite Paul Signac, Castellane, 1902, now in a private collection Left A letter from Paul Signac to Henri Edmond Cross, later dated 8 November 1902, which includes an illustration of the preparatory drawings of Castellane (on the left) and Sisteron (right)

Photo: © 2023 Archives Signac, Paris

Above The home of Alan and Simone Hartman, with the Signac hung above the fireplace

calme et volupté at La Hune. Signac was its first owner.

To a certain extent, Signac – who died in 1935, aged 71, shortly after participating in an anti-fascist rally that called for a boycott of all German products – isn’t as celebrated today as he should be. Partly that’s because of the influence of the contemporary critic Thadée Natanson, who unfairly dubbed him the “St Paul of Neo-Impressionism”: that is, a mere apostle, where Seurat had been the messiah. (Artists who die young always tend to be the most fashionable.)

Perhaps Signac’s promotion of other painters’ work throughout his career came at his own expense as well. In 1905 alone, he organised retrospectives for both of his late friends, Seurat and Van Gogh. Three years later, he was named president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants (which ran the Salon des

Indépendants), staying in the post for 25 years and consistently supporting up-and-coming artists – such as the Cubists, who had their first major showing anywhere in 1911’s exhibition.

Signac was at the centre of a network of painters who transformed Western art in the late 19th and early 20th century. Look at his biography, and this becomes a simple matter of joining the dots.

Alastair Smart is currently working on a book about Raphael.

Sale: The Alan and Simone Hartman Collection: The Inaugural Sale New York Thursday 14 December at 5pm Enquiries: Stefany Morris +1 212 644 9020 stefany.morris@bonhams.com

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The fab farewell Hunter Davies recalls Abbey Road, the last album – and, many would agree, the greatest – recorded by the Beatles

“Paul and Linda had just had a two-week holiday in Portugal with me and my wife and children”

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SOUND OF THE BEATLES

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Opposite The cover of Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles made together

Photo: © Brian Gibson

Main image The EMI TG12345 MkI Recording Console Used By The Beatles In Studio 2 at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios to Record their Groundbreaking Album ‘Abbey Road’, in studio 2 from 1968-1971 Estimate on request

t was the last album the Beatles did together – though Abbey Road would come out second last, because Let it Be had been delayed. The band knew it was the end: they were going their separate ways, with the arguments and legal rows over their company Apple Corps having worn them out. John would rather be with Yoko any time. George would rather not be a Beatle, and be in India. Ringo was fed up and had left the Beatles for a short period, but did not know what he was going to do next. Paul now had Linda – and he and Linda had just had a two–week holiday in Portugal with me and my wife and children. He was the only one who wanted the Beatles to continue, at least recording in the studio, perhaps making another film.

But when they gathered in Abbey Road Studios in July 1969 to start their new album, all their worries appeared so far away. They knuckled down to work, the atmosphere was good. Perhaps because they knew it was the end.

By the time they got to the second side of the album, they were determined to get in as many new songs as possible, even those half finished. They wanted to clear the decks, clear their minds. These shorter songs, from after ‘Because’ to ‘The End’, are commonly known as ‘The Medley’ because they segue one into the other, without any gaps. All these shorter numbers could easily have been filled out and made longer and even richer, but when I first heard ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ (which begins ‘The Medley’), I just could not get it out of my head. John and Paul both told me later that ‘Because’ was their favourite song on the album.

George Martin, who supervised the whole thing, for the occasion used a special recording console.

Extraordinarily, that very console – back in working order – is now offered by Bonhams (the technical details are overleaf) in the Sound of The Beatles: The Bonhams Magazine

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Above Iain Macmillan (British, 1938-2006): Two prints of The Beatles on Abbey Road, 1969.

Estimate: £18,000 - 20,000

Above & Right In just 10 minutes Macmillan shot the band in various directions, but it was frame no.5 that was used for the cover of the album – the only photo where all four Beatles are walking in perfect formation

‘Abbey Road’ Console sale in Knightsbridge. He always said Abbey Road was the best Beatles album, but then he was slightly biased.

In popularity polls over the decades, Sgt. Pepper is often voted the best Beatles album, for its contents and the cover, but there are lots of Beatles fans and Beatles academics – yes, there are loads of them today – who consider Abbey Road to be their finest work.

Certainly, the cover is today their most recognised, showing the pedestrian crossing outside Abbey Road Studios. As a result, the crossing has become a London icon and is now Grade II listed.

The cover would not have been permitted seven years earlier, when the Beatles started recording.

EMI would have been against it, so would the record stores, for the simple reason that the band’s name is not on the cover, and nor is the name of the album. But the Beatles were in charge of themselves by the time Abbey Road was released.

George has two songs on the album, probably his best songs ever. Poor old George felt he had been ignored for years, being the youngest, kept in his place in the shade cast by the genius of Paul and John. He often brought his songs hesitantly into the studio for them to hear, but they rarely made it on to the albums.

The reasons are partly that he was a late developer, but also that he was on his own, as a composer, whereas John and Paul had each other to spark off.

John and Paul had been so productive that it was hard to find room for a George song.

On Abbey Road, though, he had ‘Something’, which is now considered a Beatles classic, and most people

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know it is a George song – despite the fact that Frank Sinatra, when he performed it, introduced it as a “Lennon–McCartney” number.

There is no story behind the words: it is just a love song. George wrote it on a piano in an empty studio when the others were busy recording the double LP that became 1968’s The White Album.

He had got fed up with being bossed around by Paul.

George, though, clearly had his wife Pattie in mind when writing ‘Something’. Alas, wondering if their love would grow turned out to be prophetic – she eventually left him for his friend, the guitarist Eric Clapton.

“George had his wife Pattie in mind when writing ‘Something’… she left him for the guitarist Eric Clapton” George’s other song on the album, ‘Here Comes the Sun’, also has Eric connections. George was fed up with yet another Apple Corps round-table discussion, with them all shouting at each other, so he went off to Eric Clapton’s garden. He walked round, communing with nature, watching the sun, and realised spring was coming and the winter of discontent with Apple could not last for ever.

During the making of Abbey Road, spread over seven months in 1969, John missed the recording of ‘Here Comes the Sun’. So they just bashed on without him, something they would never have done back in

SOUND OF THE BEATLES

Top Left The console was a joint project between the engineers at Abbey Road (the the EMI Studios) and the Central Research Laboratories at EMIL Hayes factories Bottom Left George Harrison & Preston with the EMI TG12345 MkI console, 1969

Above Right In detail: The EMI TG12345 MkI recording console used by The Beatles to record their legendary album Abbey Road Below Right The Beatles with their producer, George Martin

1962, when John was clearly the leader. By 1969, Paul was the leader, if anyone was.

John and Yoko had been involved in a car crash in Scotland. When John was eventually beginning to recover, Yoko ordered a double bed from Harrods to be set up in the Abbey Road studio and a microphone suspended over John’s head. She would also offer her own comments and suggestions – which did not exactly please Paul.

It was just one more reason why this album was the end. To make it absolutely clear, the final song is called ‘The End’. Its lyric is only half a dozen lines, but finishes with what could be a Shakespearean couplet. ‘And in the end/The love you take/Is equal to the love you make’. The song concludes with a huge crescendo, the band all taking part, bidding their final farewell.

But – aha! – just when you think it is all over, there is a witty little ditty tacked on to the end: ‘Her Majesty’. Paul tells us that ‘Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl/But she doesn’t have a lot to say’. One day, though, he hopes to make her his.

Affectionate teasing, that didn’t stop the Queen from knighting Paul in 2014.

Hunter Davies’ book The Beatles (published in paperback by Ebury) is the only authorised biography of the band.

Sale: Sound of The Beatles: The Abbey Road Console London Thursday 14 December at 2pm Enquiries: Claire Tole-Moir +44 (0) 20 7393 3984 claire.tolemoir@bonhams.com

In the mix

Used by George Martin for the Beatles’ final album, the Abbey Road console is back up to spec With eight-track recording in the late ’60s having pushed the technical capabilities of the REDD consoles that were then in use to their limits, it was decided in 1967 that a new type of desk was required. Its design was a joint project between the Abbey Road recording engineers and the Central Research Laboratories (CRL) at the EMI Hayes factories.

This EMI TG12345 prototype (which later became known as the Mk I) incorporated technological innovations that had previously been impossible. Initially installed in the experimental room (Room 65) at Abbey Road in the summer of 1968, it was then moved to Studio 2 for use by recording artists.

The historical importance of this console did not end with the recording of Abbey Road, significant though that was. It continued to be used by each of the Fab Four for solo projects: John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, George Harrison’s classic album All Things Must Pass, tracks from Paul’s debut McCartney and Ringo’s debut Sentimental Journey.

After being removed from service at Abbey Road due to the introduction of the latest TG MK II console, the desk was dismantled and parts were donated to a school in north London. When they were no longer needed by the school, these parts were discarded, only to be later recovered by a tape-machine maintenance engineer.

The current owner has painstakingly reunited the surviving original parts. Having undergone a comprehensive, state-of-the-art, professional restoration process over the last four years, the console is now back to working order and comprises the majority (almost 70%) of original parts from the historic Abbey Road recording sessions.

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Boiling point The CoBrA artists arose in fury from the ashes of the Second World War. Collector Karine Huts tells Lucinda Bredin what the movement means to her Photograph by Juan Wyns

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PLATFORM

Left Max Hollein, the Director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York Below Up front: Wangechi Mutu The New Ones Will Free Us on the museum’s facade

Left Karine Huts with her collection at the CoBrA Depot Above Corneille (1922-2010) Peinture, 1952 From the Personal Collection of Karine Huts

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t’s often behind the façade of a terraced house where you find the great surprises. We are in Antwerp in a no-man’s land between the old city and a baffling ring road that, with one false turn, funnels cars in the wrong direction to spit them out the other side of the river. However, take a side street and there’s a row of blank-faced houses alongside large turn-of-the-century industrial units. A turn of the key and one steps from the street into the world of the 1950s: Scandinavian furniture, green floorboards, a vintage television transmitting jumpy black-and-white images, and large, vibrant paintings

“Dubuffet didn’t like CoBrA, but he was the first to go back to childhood and savage adolescence” on the walls. This is the CoBrA Depot, a gallery space devoted to the works and publications of the anarchic art movement that began with a bang and manifesto in 1948, only to dismantle itself three years later in 1951.

The collection features some 200 works by all the leading exponents of this Northern European movement: Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky, Corneille, Asger Jorn… indeed, there are so many works that a sizable proportion are displayed on racks in a stacked hang. I know this because a gallery assistant slowly pulls out one of the wire panels to reveal a series of seminal, museum-quality

masterpieces. The colours, paint-laden brushstrokes and jangly shapes jostle together on the same mesh square.

It’s quite a sight. Oh, and there’s a piano here that was transformed by Corneille.

The CoBrA Depot is the brainchild of Karine Huts who, with her husband Fernand Huts, has one of the most impressive collections of CoBrA art. In the mid-1990s, the Huts family bought some works by the CoBrA artists from a fellow politician. Fernand – owner of Katoen Natie, one of the best-known companies in Belgium – was at that time in Parliament, and this collection was, if you like, a high-wattage starter pack on which to build.

The couple have not stopped adding to it since then.

For Karine, the movement is “the European answer to the Abstract Expressionism of the Americans”. CoBrA – the name is an amalgamation of the first letters of the three Northern European cities: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam – exploded into life after the Second World War. As Karine says, “The three countries had had a traumatic occupation under the Nazis, having been isolated from each other and the rest of Europe. And suddenly there was this wonderful idea of cross-border cooperation and healing together. The movement was a band of friends saying let’s go back to basics. These artists were done with all those schools, academies, all the -isms.

They wanted to return to their souls. They wanted to rewrite rule books, but also to do away with books.”

We are sitting in Karine’s home on the outskirts of Antwerp – where, incidentally, a Jackson Pollock Bonhams Magazine

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hangs on the walls, along with old masters and a wondrous work by Léon Spilliaert, the first painting she bought. There are other collections she and her husband have created – there’s a staggering display of Coptic textiles in another space, Art HQ, that could have been plucked from a museum – but one senses that the CoBrA collection is particularly close to her heart. As she says, “There are very few art movements that have set out to change the world.”

The manifesto drawn up by the core members of CoBrA – Karel Appel, Constant, Corneille, Christian Dotremont, Asger Jorn and Joseph Noiret – was signed in a Paris café in 1948. It did not disappoint. It was a throatgrabbing call to arms entitled La Cause était entendue (‘The case is closed’), which trumpeted: “If you don’t go to extremes, why even go?”. The rallying point was experimentation, spontaneity and freedom of expression.

The group cast around for inspiration, and realised that children’s artwork encapsulated all these qualities, as did that of those who were then regarded as being on the fringes: mental health patients and untrained artists, those uncorrupted by the heavy hand of instruction. Karine has written in an essay ‘The Art of Intuition’: “CoBrA paintings really were primitive and annoyingly childish at times. The colours they used seemed second-rate. And,

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to make matters worse, they smeared their garish primary tones almost formlessly over the canvas. But it was about returning to the source.” She stands by those sentiments – and points out that one of the group’s detractors, Jean Dubuffet, was in fact “the grandfather” of the movement.

She says, “Dubuffet didn’t like CoBrA, but he was the first to go back to childhood and savage adolescence.”

“There are very few art movements that have set out to change the world” Why does Karine think the group came to a juddering halt in 1951? “Well, the artists couldn’t keep their rage at boiling point for their whole life. I mean they had to eat, and I think reality overtook them. Appel saw what happened in America and how small a movement it was compared to Abstract Expressionism. I think he found the group confining – he wanted to extend his boundaries and his borders. He wanted to move on. There is a saying that somebody who is not a rebel at 20 doesn’t have a heart.

If he is still a rebel at 40, he doesn’t have a head.”

PLATFORM

Left On the wire: Karine Huts with her collection at the CoBrA Depot Above Asger Jorn’s Le Forgeron avuegle d’une mythe muet from the collection of the Huts family

Above right Corneille, Mon canal chante, 1949 Estimate: DKK2,500,000 - 3,000,00 (€335,000 - 400,000) Right Asger Jorn’s Untitled from 1942, sold for €210,000 in 2022

This extraordinary movement has seen a lot of attention in the past two years. One manifestation has been the dedicated CoBrA sale at Bruun Rasmussen.

In December, it will offer Lucioles (Fireflies) by Pierre Alechinsky, one of Karine’s favourite artists, and a spectacular Corneille, Mon canal chante, from 1949, the seminal year. No collection would be complete without a Karel Appel, and the forthcoming sale has one from 1957.

For Karine, CoBrA has had an extraordinary impact on the cultural history of the world – and on her. “It was the only contemporaneous response to American Abstract Expressionism, so it is important for that reason alone.

But, for me, its more personal: the CoBrA movement arose out of the ruins of Europe. A shared feeling emerged, of togetherness. It is not the subject matter of the works, so much as the colours and their spontaneous, primal approach. CoBrA paintings represent the art of intuition, and so there is always something to discover.”

Lucinda Bredin is Editor of Bonhams Magazine.

Sale: CoBrA – Powerful Voices of Post-war Europe Bruun Rasmussen, Copenhagen Tuesday 5 December at 7pm Enquiries: Niels Raben nr@bruun-rasmussen.dk and Bonhams Brussels christine.deschaetzen@bonhams.com

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Main image Charles Cundall (1890-1971) A Cup Tie at Crystal Palace, Corinthians v Manchester City, 1926 oil on panel 59 x 75cm (23¼ x 29½in) Estimate: £100,000 - 150,000 ($130,000 - 200,000)

Eye on the ball

A matter of life and death? Football is more artistically important than that, says Matthew Sturgis

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ootball deserves its epithet as ‘the Beautiful Game’. To those with the aesthetic sense to see beyond the striving of 22 muddied oafs attempting to kick an inflated bladder between two posts, there is something about the athletic ballet, the shifting trigonometry, the colour, pageantry and passion. But has the game inspired artists to capture that beauty?

Well, yes it has. Many, many artists. Picasso was clearly touched by the magic of the game. It is there in the joyous Footballeur statuette that he created in 1965: a simple white starburst, flowing with harmonious energy. Lowry painted memorable footballing scenes, his matchstick figures being drawn like iron-filings towards the magnet of the stadium. Many of the Young British Artists (now not so young) have expressed their enthusiasm for the game in

“Lowry’s matchstick figures are drawn like iron-filings towards the magnet of the stadium” art. In 1996, there was an exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery bringing together several of them: Mark Wallinger exhibited a giant scarf, twisted into the shape of the double helix, titled Man United; Simon Patterson presented a picture of The Last Supper Arranged According to the Flat Back Four Formation (Jesus Christ in Goal).

And then, giving a proper sense of the depth and richness of this tradition, there are the works in the extraordinary collection, built up over a lifetime, offered

by Bonhams in December in the ‘Football: The Beautiful Game’ sale. There is the grand sweep of Charles Cundall’s magnificent 1926 panorama A Cup Tie at Crystal Palace, Corinthians v Manchester City – from an age when amateur and professional sides competed on almost equal terms. (The game was drawn, with City winning the replay.) There are Louis Wain’s footballing cats (Jacksons’

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Above left Henry Mayo Bateman (1887-1970) Summer Pastimes, Ltd. watercolour, pen and ink 36 x 25.5cm (14¼ x 10in) Estimate: £4,000 - 6,000 Above right Carel Weight (1908-1997) Cup Tie oil on board 48.2 x 61cm (19 x 24in) Estimate: £7,000 - 10,000 Right George Bissill (1896-1973) Football – the Penalty oil on canvas 58.5 x 71cm (23 x 28in) Estimate: £2,000 - 3,000

Always Score) and Ronald Searle’s vision of the reluctant Molesworth with the ball at his feet. There is the oblique tension of The Penalty (by George Bissill) and direct drama of The Tackle (by George Edward Narraway).

The majority of the pictures date from the 1920s to the 1980s, an age before the Premier League was established in 1992, with its razzmatazz, its new stadia, its TV-dominated schedules, and its sense that football might not be a game at all, but a ‘product’. These pictures conjure up a lost world of standing terraces, Saturday afternoon kick-offs, flatcapped goalkeepers, unchecked shoulder-charges, ‘heavy’ pitches and heavier balls. There is a cumulative sense here of football as an essentially working-class sport, woven through the physical and social fabric of national life.

Indeed, one British social historian (I think Eric Hobsbawm) put forward the interesting theory that, as the working masses deserted the countryside for the towns during the 19th century, they became deracinated from the cycle of the agricultural year. Organised sport, he suggested, came to offer an alternative structure. Not for nothing do we talk of the football ‘season’ – balanced by ‘the summer game’ (cricket). Each had their due time.

But, over recent decades, the inexorable spread of football into the summer – with the constant demand for additional fixtures – has meant that the regular ‘season’

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now runs pretty much from August to June. The seasonal structure of the old order has broken down. It seems almost akin to the effects of global warming.

A sense of this dangerous imbalance was even present early in the 20th century. H.M. Bateman’s drawing titled Summer Pastimes, Ltd shows the fat-cat ‘Secretary of a Football Company’ lounging on bags of money, while the players disport themselves beneath a blazing sun. The caption reads: “Yes it’s a bit hot – but then look at the gate [receipts], boys!” This was 1910, when the Football Association had stipulated that the opening matches of the new ‘season’ should be played on 1 September.

Football depends for much of its drama on the crowd, and the crowd is part of the sport’s artistic appeal too. In an age of steep terracing, the sea – or cliff – of (mainly male) standing supporters is both a challenge and gift to painters.

In Carel Weight’s magnificent Cup Tie, the grey cliffs of terracing tower above the action on the pitch, and block out the pink-tinged sky of late-afternoon.

Such juxtapositions are a reminder that these pictures – and the whole idea of depicting a football match – belong in the great tradition of painting ‘Modern Life’, the tradition that runs from Constantin Guys to Degas, and on to Sickert. Sickert had a studio on Highbury Fields, close to Arsenal’s ground, though he never painted a match (and

LONDON Opposite below right Louis Wain (1860-1939) Jacksons’ Always Score collage, pencil, bodycolour, pen and ink 31 x 48.2cm (12⅛ x 19in) Estimate: £6,000 - 8,000 Far right William E. Narraway (1915-1979) The Tackle oil on canvas 61 x 76.5cm (24 x 30in) Estimate: £2,000 - 3,000 Right Ronald Searle (1920-2011) Molesworth: Back in the Jug Agane pen and ink 18.4 x 16.5 cm (7¼ x 6½in) Estimate: £3,000 - 4,000

Below Henry Cotterill Deykin (1905-1989) Aston Villa v Sunderland oil on canvas 60 x 183 cm (23½ x 72 in) Estimate: £7,000 - 10,000

indeed complained rather bitterly about the noise of the crowds on Saturday afternoons). But his legacy echoes in these paintings of ‘the people’s opera’ in all its crowded glory. It is readily traceable in the fine picture by Ruskin Spear, and in Bernard Dunstan and Michael Critchlow.

A more direct commentary on the game’s evolution is provided by the cartoons of ‘Giles’, ‘Larry’ and ‘JAK’, of Roy Ullyet and Thelwell. In these often brilliant drawings – from the now vanished worlds of dentist’s-waiting-room Punch and the broadsheet Daily Express – we observe cash-strapped clubs, betting scandals, and the sad drop in ‘gates’ as hooliganism drove many away from the game.

It is a drama played out against the once-familiar backdrop of shed-like stands and steep terraces. This old architectural arrangement of straight-sided stands close to the pitch, so different from the enclosed cauldron of the modern arena, was a gift to artists, as it left the four corners open, allowing in light and giving vistas to the world beyond. Or, indeed, a glimpse from the world outside on to the drama of the game – there’s a charming little watercolour by Harold Shelton of Carlisle Football Ground, “glimpsed beyond two flowering cherry trees”.

Artists are constantly drawn to the human ballet of the game. E.H. Shepard even produced a drawing titled Footballerina. The challenge of arresting movement in

painting has, of course, been faced by many down the ages – from ancient battle-painters to Degas and his balletomane disciples. And it lends some of these football paintings a sense of classical grandeur. There is something of Michelangelo about Michael Ayrton’s chalk-drawing Study for Arsenal v Aston Villa 1953.

Ayrton’s picture is black-and-white. But elsewhere colour runs riot. The heraldic excitement of different strips carries an emotional charge: the bold strips, the occasional quarterings, the familiar reds and blues. On this score, it is interesting to note that the most artistically represented side in the sale is the Arsenal. At least half a dozen of the paintings show the Gunners in action. Is this, one wonders, because of the compelling aesthetic impact of their whitesleeved red shirts, set against the vivid green of the pitch?

Or simply because they are the club closest to the Slade School of Art, the cultural heartlands of north London – and, indeed, Bonhams auction house.

Matthew Sturgis was ghostwriter of Paul Gascoigne’s autobiography.

Sale: Football: The Beautiful Game London, Online Monday 4 December-Wednesday 13 December Enquiries: Christopher Dawson +44 (0) 20 7468 8296 christopher.dawson@bonhams.com

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Words and pictures Helen Kirwan-Taylor talks to Charlie Mackesy about The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse Photograph by David Loftus Left Charlie Mackesy with his beloved dachshund Barney – occasional star of his owner’s prolific art

© David Loftus

Opposite Charlie Mackesy (born 1962) Storms get tired too ink and watercolour on a sheet of music Estimate £7,000 - 10,000 ($9,000 - 12,000)

M

ost of us have never met Charlie Mackesy, the artist and author behind the book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, but we feel that we have. Ever since his ink and watercolour drawings started to appear on Instagram in 2017, people have been magnetically drawn into his world. As well as the simple messages of kindness, understanding, love, compassion and, above all, hope written around drawings of his four characters, we saw glimpses of his own life. His feed contains pictures of many, many drawings – 50,000 of them – strewn across every room of his house.

His late mother (he was devoted to her and, alongside his sister Sara, cared for her) featured often, as well as his beloved dachshund Barney, who occasionally walked across a drawing. Almost apologetic text accompanied his posts (which gained momentum peak-pandemic), as though he was embarrassed to be taking up our attention.

But that is just what he has done, because his book has now sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, and the short animated film that followed it has won both a BAFTA and an Oscar. All this seems to matter

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very little to this artist from the north of England who never went to art school. “If someone told me that my art would only reach ten people, I would still do it,” he says, reminding me that “I’ve been doing it professionally since I was 20.” It’s a good thing that the global exposure only came now, though: “I probably couldn’t have handled it at 25,” he admits. He tells me

“If someone told me that my art would only reach ten people, I would still do it” the goal of selling 45 works at Bonhams in a sale running from 7-18 December (“a great privilege”, he says) is if they can touch more people. “I’m not interested in the art world,” he adds. “It’s people who interest me.”

Mackesy does not like to be put into a box, in the way that artists often are by dealers and critics. Still, as one of his followers, I can say that what resonated with me the most was the simplicity of the drawings,

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Opposite left Charlie Mackesy Sometimes your mind plays tricks on you ink, watercolour and pencil on paper Estimate: £3,000 - 5,000 ($4,000 - 6,000)

Above Charlie Mackesy We love you whether you can fly or not ink and watercolour on printed music sheet Estimate: £7,000 - 10,000 ($9,000 - 12,000)

Right Charlie Mackesy One day you’ll see ink and watercolour on paper Estimate: £3,000 - 5,000 ($4,000 - 6,000)

which seem to come from a fast-moving but highly skilled hand. Lines are blurred and often overlap. They often don’t end. The charming characters bleed into landscapes with the occasional ink stain thrown in for good measure (the moon in one drawing is a tea stain).

Nothing is mannered or laboured. Indeed, it feels like a kind of piano improvisation. The characters reminded me a bit of Winnie-the-Pooh, though it is The Wind in the Willows that he cites as an influence.

The combination of drawings and simple but profound words is powerful. Mackesy tells me he has fans who are 80 years old and fans who are 4 years old (the cake-eating mole is a particular favourite). That The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse crosses every literary genre and language is a publishing anomaly.

The book hit the right chord just when we needed it, coming out in 2019, just before the pandemic. We live in a scary, fast-changing world. Connection is getting harder to find. Loneliness is rampant. “When the big things feel out of control, focus on what you love right under your nose,” he writes in one of his busier drawings, showing a windswept forest with a small picture of the horse and the boy. Comfort is at hand in places you already know, like nature and friendship and, of course, animals. It’s OK to feel vulnerable – everybody does. Comparisons are odious, fear keeps us all small, kindness is easy.

Mackesy does not like simplifications (or flattery).

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Opposite right Charlie Mackesy Nothing beats kindness ink, watercolour and pencil on paper Estimate: £3,000 - 5,000 ($4,000 - 6,000)

He thinks what hit a nerve is that his book talks about honesty, “and allowing ourselves to feel”. In one of his drawings, he writes, “When the dark clouds come.

Keep going… and love most of all.”

There’s no preaching, just empathetic observations that every person (including children) can relate to.

Mackesy says the language of his work comes from a raw place, namely “my own experience”. The fact

“When the big things feel out of control, focus on what you love right under your nose” that his best friend died in a car crash when he was 19 played a big part in his emotional journey, but the advice and wisdom the characters share (“What do you think success is?” asks the boy, “Love” says the mole) are universal. “I get emails (literally millions of them) from therapists, schools, hospitals, from soldiers with PTSD and people thinking of ending their lives,” he says. “Some make me cry. It’s a responsibility when you put things out in the world.

I will never forget some of the emails.” He answers as many as he can.

We chat briefly about how to deal with the many

KNIGHTSBRIDGE

Below right Charlie Mackesy A study for the cover of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse ink, watercolour and pencil on paper Estimate: £3,000 - 5,000 ($4,000 - 6,000)

horrible events taking place in the world. “All the things happening are tragedies,” he says, “and we focus our interest on them, but there’s also a huge amount of love around.”

Though self-taught, Mackesy has been drawing since he was a child, having been deeply influenced by Tintin, Asterix and Obelix, and particularly the work of cartoonist Edward Ardizzone (“he had a powerful effect on me”). Mackesy was raised in Northumberland, a “wild and rural existence where the landscape was interwoven into the fabric of life. There was such an unspoken connection,” he says. I ask if this might have influenced his work, which is often set in nature with little or no boundary between earth and sky (he seldom fills a whole page). “Humans are not separate from nature,” he replies. “They are part of it.” His drawings make even more sense in that context – I’m thinking of the drawing with the fox, the boy and the mole looking at a shooting star, with the words “So much beauty we need to look after” written below.

Mackesy tells me the genesis of the book was a WhatsApp group with friends, where he would post drawings to gauge their reaction. It was this sounding board that led to his Instagram page, and the rest we know. “I was approached by a few editors. A few came around and showed enthusiasm.” He is thoughtful.

“Often, I’d wonder why we were doing this. The only reason really is if it could make someone feel better.”

Helen Kirwan-Taylor is an artist. She also writes for the Financial Times, The Times and Harper’s Bazaar.

Sale: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse: Original Works by Charlie Mackesy London, Online 7-18 December (viewing between 10 and 12 December at Bonhams Knightsbridge) Enquiries: Catherine King +44 (0) 20 7393 3884 catherine.king@bonhams.com

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Prints & Multiples Los Angeles Tuesday 26 March 10am

David Hockney (born 1937) Hotel Acatlan: Two Weeks Later, from Moving Focus, 1985 Lithograph in colors on two sheets of TGL handmade paper Estimate: $60,000 - $80,000 Enquiries: Morisa Rosenberg +1 323 436 5435 morisa.rosenberg@bonhams.com

WINE

Left Port houses along the Douro River in Ribeira, Porto

amnat/ Alamy Stock Photo

Below A 12-bottle case of Quinta do Noval Nacional 1963, sold

by Bonhams for £27,500

Coming to Port What makes a great Port? Richard Mayson knows the key producers and the best vintage years

V

intage Port is a wine collector’s dream, combining limited quantities with longevity – the best can develop in bottle for a century or more. But what is it?

Wine from a single year, a Vintage Port is bottled without filtration after around two years in cask, then ages slowly in bottle over the next 10-20 years before it is ready to drink. It often comes from plots of old, deep-rooted, interplanted vines.

The grapes trodden either by foot in stone lagares (or very carefully by machines) to extract as much colour and flavour as possible. Then fermentation is stopped by adding a fortifying spirit.

A potential ‘vintage’ wine is kept aside and monitored. If its producer (‘shipper’) is convinced it is of exceptional quality, a vintage is ‘declared’ – a decision that isn’t taken lightly: there are rarely more than three declarations a decade. (Occasionally the shippers fail to agree, so there is a so-called ‘split vintage’.) A shipper may declare up to 15,000 cases, but sometimes as few as a few hundred cases. These are the ultimate collector’s wines. Either way, Vintage Port accounts for no more than 2% of the total Port produced.

Vintage Port was traditionally the flagship wine of the so-called ‘British’ shippers – Cockburn’s, Croft, Dow’s, Fonseca, Graham’s, Sandeman, Taylor’s, Warre’s – while the so-called ‘Portuguese’

houses (Ferreira, Niepoort, Ramos Pinto, Quinta do Noval) focused on colheita and tawny. More recently, this distinction has blurred. The immaculate single-estate Quinta do Noval, for instance, has not only declared every year for the past decade but also produces the fantastically rare Noval Nacional, a wine made from a single plot of ungrafted wines. Other shippers followed suit with tiny quantities of their own site-specific Vintage Ports, such as Taylor’s Quinta de Vargellas Vinha Velha and Graham’s Stone Terraces, of which six bottles of the 2011 vintage are in the forthcoming Bonhams auction.

Vintage Port is generally offered en primeur soon after declaration (usually 18 months or so after the harvest). Thereafter the price climbs steadily, then jumps when the Port is almost ready to drink. On top of that, some years command a premium due to their overall quality: recent highlights at Bonhams include four bottles of Taylor’s 1945 for £2,684, three bottles of Graham’s 1948 for £1,586 and six bottles of Quinta do Noval 1966 for £1,708.

Vintage Port is still something of a bargain, certainly in comparison to the secondary market for Bordeaux and Burgundy. Even better, the last decade or so has been exceptionally kind to the Douro vineyards. There were classic Port declarations in 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2011. For the first time in history,

Taylor’s (one of the most respected names in Vintage Port) declared three years in a row (2018, 2017, 2016). Going back a decade, 2009, 2007, 2003 and 2000 were all declared years, with the latter now just about ready to drink.

Significantly, a dramatic improvement in the quality of the fortifying spirit – which makes up 20% of the finished wine – has meant the 2007 and 2011 declared vintages are notable for the purity and clear expression of fruit.

Rather like the Seven Ages of Man, Vintage Port tends to enjoy a short, fragrant bloom of youth before it shuts down for a period of surly adolescence.

Then it emerges as an adult, gaining in gravitas until it reaches its peak, usually between 20 and 40 years of age. Wines that are now mature adults include 1997, 1994, 1992/1991 (a split vintage), 1985, 1983, 1980, 1977, 1970, 1966 and 1963.Examples in the sale are Warre 1963, 1966 & 1970, as well as 6 cases of Taylor 1970. For the finest years, the peak becomes a long plateau and old age may not be reached for 80 years or more. Anyone born in 1970, 1966, 1963, 1955, 1948, 1945, 1935, 1931 and 1927 has a wine that will accompany them for life.

And a future lifelong classic? My tip is 2011 – but keep an eye on 2017, too.

Richard Mayson is author of Port and the Douro.

Sale: Fine & Rare Wines London Online from 28 November to 7 December Enquiries: Richard Harvey MW wine@bonhams.com

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Art d’Après-Guerre et Contemporain Paris Thursday 7 December 5pm

Giuseppe Capogrossi (1900-1972) Superficie 106 signed and dated 54 oil on canvas 119 x 161cm (46 x 63¼in) Estimate: €180,000 - 250,000 ($190,000 - 270,000) Enquiries: Giacomo Balsamo +44 (0) 20 7468 5837 giacomo.balsamo@bonhams.com

AROUND THE GLOBE

Around the

Globe

Sasha Thomas highlights a selection of Bonhams’ sales worldwide

Knightsbridge Eye of the storm In 1965, Beatlemania was at its absolute peak, leaving the Fab Four in need of places to escape the intense public attention. For John Lennon, it was his Kenwood home in Surrey, south-west of London, that provided respite. It is said that Lennon would spend idle hours near the swimming pool, and in 1965 he commissioned a psychedelic eye mosaic for the deep-end wall of the pool, probably from his own design. Comprising approximately 17,000 tiles, the mosaic was created by Joseph Ritrovato, a master tiler who installed it singlehanded. The mosaic remained in situ within the swimming pool until 1984, when it was removed for preservation. It then went on public display at the International Garden Festival at the Royal Festival Gardens, Liverpool, where it remained from 1985 until the gardens’ closure in 1987. In 2002, it was moved to the Museum of Liverpool Life, and in 2016 became part of You Say You Want a Revolution?, the V&A’s international blockbuster exhibition on counterculture. The mosaic is offered at Bonhams’ Rock, Pop & Film sale this November.

Brussels At the art of it all Modern art would not be the same without the Belgians. René Magritte is among the most recognisable of the Surrealist artists. Brussels was (with Copenhagen and Amsterdam) a founding city of CoBrA. James Ensor played a key role in Symbolism and Expressionism, and Pol Bury did the same later for Kinetic Art. Then there was Luminism, the Belgian cousin of Impressionism, led by Emile Claus and Théo van Rysselberghe. Nonetheless, Félicien Rops was referred to by French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire as “the only true artist (in the sense in which I, and perhaps I alone, understand the word artist) that I have found in Belgium” – an interpretation directly contradicted by the impressive single-owner collection of Belgian masterpieces coming to

auction at Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr this December, which shows Belgian artists can more than hold their own. Expect works not only by Rops and Bury, but also by Magritte’s Surrealist contemporaries Jane Graverol and Paul Delvaux, and many more.

Image: Jane Graverol (1905-1984) Le don de la parole, 1961 Estimate: €20,000 - 30,000 Sale: Belgian Masterpieces, 4 December Enquiries: Sabine Mund +32 2 880 73 85 sabine.mund@bonhams-csc.com

Image: John Lennon’s psychedelic eye mosaic, 1965 Estimate: Estimate on Request Sale: Rock, Pop & Film, 29 November Enquiries: Claire Tole-Moir claire.tolemoir@bonhams.com

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AROUND THE GLOBE

Edinburgh Family matters “Tyde what may betide, Haig shall be Haig of Bemersyde” – so goes a 13th-century poem by Thomas the Rhymer. And, indeed, Bemersyde remains the seat of the Haig family to this day. Dating to the 16th century as a ‘peel tower’ (fortified keep), Bemersyde House was purchased by the British government in 1921, then presented to Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, the British commander in World War I. The same year, Haig had established the Earl Haig Fund, now known as the Poppy Appeal, to raise funds for injured servicemen. In December, items from the prominent Scottish family go from Bemersyde to Bonhams, with the collection of the late Earl and Countess Haig being offered as part of Bonhams’ Home & Interiors sale in Edinburgh and in the London Jewels sale. As well as furniture from the family home and paintings by George, 2nd Earl Haig, the sale includes a diamond tiara/necklace given to Dorothy Maud Vivian on the occasion of her marriage to the 1st Earl Haig in 1905.

Image: Pearl and diamond tiara/necklace, c.1905 Estimate: £15,000 - 20,000 Sales: London Jewels, 7 December Home & Interiors including the Collection of the Late Earl and Countess Haig, 12 December Enquiries: Jennifer Tonkin +44 (0) 20 7393 3972 jennifer.tonkin@bonhams.com

Hong Kong Good heavens Virūpākṣa, the Buddhist Guardian of the West, is one of Four Heavenly Kings converted by the Buddha and entrusted with protecting the inhabitants of the world. Figures of Virūpākṣa would have stood before one of Tibet’s greatest artistic wonders: the eight tashi gomang (‘Many Doors of Auspiciousness’) stupas of Densatil Monastery. Only 16 of these guardians survived intact after Densatil’s destruction in the second half of the 20th century, and, notably, only four were ever dispersed beyond mainland China.

In December, one of these figures is offered by Bonhams Hong Kong – its three counterparts are acknowledged highlights of world-renowned museum collections. The sole Heavenly King remaining in private hands, this remarkable Virūpākṣa is the grandest free-standing Densatil sculpture available on the art market, and one of the largest gilt-bronze Tibetan sculptures ever to be auctioned.

Image: A gilt copper alloy figure of Virūpākṣa, central Tibet, Densatil Monastery, early 15th century Estimate: HK$35,000,000 - 55,000,000 Sale: Images of Devotion, 1 December Enquiries: Edward Wilkinson +44 (0) 20 7468 8314 edward.wilkinson@bonhams.com

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Stockholm Domestic bliss Where would an artist be without their muse? Often subject to condescension, a muse can be the force that enables the artist to create. Swedish painter Carl Larsson (1853-1919) is a case in point.

His muse was his partner in life as well as art – his wife Karin. Herself a trained artist, Karin was her husband’s foremost model and critic, as well as the creator and custodian of the interiors and domestic life her husband so affectionately depicted.

Larsson’s painting Sommardag, Karin och Brita i trädgården/Sommartid, which is offered at Bukowskis this December, is one such tranquil snapshot of Larsson’s life, depicting his wife and daughter in their garden in Sundborn in 1911. Karin is sitting comfortably with a piece of handiwork in hand. She is wearing one of her signature home-woven striped cotton dresses, sewn in a simple fashion that was distinctly hers. And, typical of her modesty in supporting her husband’s art, a sun hat entirely obscures her face.

Image: Carl Larsson (1853-1919) Sommardag, Karin och Brita i trädgården/Sommartid, 1911 Estimate: SEK6,000,000 - 8,000,000 Sale: Important Winter Sale, 6-8 December Enquiries: Andreas Rydén +46 (0 ) 728 58 71 39 andreas.ryden@bukowskis.com

Paris Drawing rooms

Paris Clément Gaillard

Pierre Le-Tan (1950-2019) was only 17 when he received his first commission: to illustrate the cover of The New Yorker. It was a lucky break that would lead to a further 17 covers for the magazine, as well as commissions for The World of Interiors, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

Known for his subtle pen and watercolour drawings, Le-Tan’s illustrations would also form the basis of numerous book covers, and have adorned creations of his daughter, renowned fashion designer Olympia Le-Tan. Now a selection of his works comes to Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr for the dedicated sale, Le Monde de Pierre Le-Tan. Le-Tan was fascinated by collectors and interior worlds, with his illustrations often serving as keyholes into the lives of absent figures; this sale is a chance to step inside Le-Tan’s own pastel world.

Clément Gaillard has been appointed as the new Whisky Specialist at Bonhams Paris.

Following the success of the first wine and whisky sales in Paris in 2022 and 2023, Clément’s appointment marks Bonhams’ continued growth in Europe. He studied art history at the Sorbonne, but his career began at La Maison du Whisky’s boutique in 2016 – before moving on to their Golden Promise whisky bar, where he specialised in whiskies and collectable spirits. He then became an expert at Fine Spirits Auction, an online auction platform formed by La Maison du Whisky in collaboration with iDealwine. Clément will work as the head of the department in continental Europe, with Whisky sales to be held in Paris twice a year.

He speaks both French and English.

Image: Pierre Le-Tan (1950-2019) Portrait of a young man, after Parmigianino Estimate: €1,500 - 2,500 Sale: Le Monde de Pierre Le-Tan, 19 December Enquiries: Joan Yip +33 1 89 53 43 57 joan.yip@bonhams.com

Enquiries: Clément Gaillard +33 1 47 27 85 24 clement.gaillard@bonhams.com

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AROUND THE GLOBE

New York Eminent Victorians The Victorian era is often thought to have been rather austere, but collectors David and Helen Milling begged to differ: they saw it as a period of vibrant colour. Their lifelong mission was to showcase work by the most prominent and influential potters, designers and artists of that time, as this impressive collection – offered at auctions in London, New York and Boston – demonstrates. From Pre-Raphaelite pieces to designs by Tiffany Studios, the Milling Collection showcases the richness of Victorian design. John Ruskin, the most imposing of the Victorian art critics, insisted colour was a gift from God. This collection is particularly heavenly.

Image: Highlights from the Helen and David Milling Collection Estimate: Lots range $100 - 50,000 Sale: 20th Century Decorative Arts, London, 5 December Modern Design, New York, 12 December Enquiries: Derya Baydur +1 917 206 1615 derya.baydur@bonhams.com

Los Angeles The morning after It’s the biggest night in the Hollywood calendar, when the stars dress up for the party of year, and the lucky few wake up with more than just the year’s biggest hangover – they also wake up clutching an Academy Award. When photographer Terry O’Neill set out to capture Faye Dunaway’s win for Best Actress in 1977 for her role in Network, he wanted a different sort of picture from the usual glitzy shot on the night. He wanted the morning after. So he arranged to meet Dunaway at the Beverly Hills Hotel at 6.30am the next day. “She hadn’t slept,” O’Neill later recalled, “and the implications of a watershed event in her career were only just beginning to dawn on her.”

The image of an exhausted Dunaway having breakfast by the pool, surrounded by the morning’s papers, was to become one of the defining images of Hollywood. The image poses the question: what happens next for a star at the top of her career? Well, in December, a large-format print of this iconic image comes to Bonhams Made in California: Photographs sale.

Image: Terry O’Neill (1938-2019) Faye Dunaway, 1977 Estimate: $20,000 - 30,000 Sale: Made in California: Photographs, 1-11 December Enquiries: Kelly Sidley +1 646 837 8132 kelly.sidley@bonhams.com

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Hans Coper, Lucie Rie, Jennifer Lee: Ceramic masterpieces from a French private collection Paris Wednesday 6 December 4pm

Hans Coper (1920-1981) Large 'Spade' form, circa 1972 Stoneware, layered porcelain slips and engobes over a textured and incised body, the interior with a manganese glaze 30 x 20 x 8.5cm (11¾ x 7 x 3in) Estimate : €60,000 - 80,000 ($65,000 - 85,000) Enquiries: Ambre Fioc +33 1 56 79 12 63 ambre.fioc@bonhams.com

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London Jewels

London Thursday 7 December 11am Cartier: Ruby and Diamond Clip and Earclip Suite/ Brooch Combination Circa 1960 Estimate: £25,000 - 45,000 ($31,000 - 55,000) Enquiries: Jennifer Tonkin +44 (0) 20 7393 3972 jennifer.tonkin@bonhams.com

My

Julianknxx found the ideal space for the world he wanted to show

A

Photo: © Barbican Centre

Photo: © James Anastasi

Favourite Room

Julianknxx Chorus in Rememory of Flight, 2023

space that really had an impact on me when I first walked into it was The Curve, in London’s Barbican Centre. I went there to see Toyin Ojih Odutola’s show in 2020, and I vividly remember entering the gallery for the first time and realising that she had created a whole world.

The exhibition followed a tribe in Nigeria, and Ojih Odutola crafted this storyline via these amazing paintings set to sound. It was incredible, and it’s that world-building, which the space allows, that really captured my imagination. It left not only an impression in my mind, but a feeling. I felt like her paintings came alive there, and I just remember thinking: what an amazing way to show work.

The best thing about The Curve is that it provides you with these moments of encounter as you go along, and the chance to take a journey where you’re learning about the world created before you as you walk through the space.

The gallery made me think about my own journey and the cities that I’ve been to, being born in Sierra Leone and living in London. It made me think of how I would make my own sort of encounter within the space. So, to be commissioned to take over The Curve myself was an exciting opportunity, as it allowed me to explore more of what I want to within my work: encounters and world-building.

Toyin Ojih Odutola A Countervailing Theory, 2020

You come into my commission, and have the first encounter (the first film), before moving to the second film, as if it is a cleansing before you move to the final encounter (the final film). The sound overlaps without interrupting, so the viewer is pulled along by it. Be it via the tunnel or a river or a sea, in The Curve, you’re carried along to the end.

The journey of my work ends with a final film, Chorus in Rememory of Flight, which in part uses the Square Mile of the City of London, and the Seven Gates which used to be the points of access into the city, as a way of looking at where London is now. The remains of one of the gates, Cripplegate, is within the Barbican. I found this raised the idea of access and belonging.

The Curve is more flexible than the usual white-painted, squarefour-walls gallery. It is more of a performance space, and different artists use it differently, but it is also non-space. It’s behind the theatre and main lobby, an in-between space that’s not meant to be an exhibition area at all. To work with it is to work with a non-space, and that spoke to my work – The Curve can hold a poem, a journey, and sound.

That is why I love this room, a non-space of encounters within the City’s Square Mile.

“The Curve can hold a poem, a journey, and sound”

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Julianknxx is an artist, poet and film-maker. His exhibition Chorus in Rememory of Flight is at The Curve until 11 February; barbican.org.uk.

Photo: © Barbican Centre

PEOPLE & PLACES

Les Grandes Marques du Monde à Paris Paris Thursday 1 February 10.30am

1951 MASERATI A6 1500/3C GRAN TURISMO Coachwork by Carrozzeria Pinin Farina Chassis no. 076, Engine no. 076 Estimate: €450,000 - €650,000 Enquiries: Gregory Tuytens +32 4 7171 2736 gregory.tuytens@bonhamscars.com

Pink Fluorite on Smoky Quartz Tiefengletscher, Furka, Uri, Switzerland 28.5 cm tall x 12.7 cm wide

wilenskyminerals.com