34 17th April 2010
art market
The regions keep up with the Burne-Joneses
■ Top-rank portrait drawing brings £54,000 in Cambridge
Alex Capon
reports
AT the peak of his career, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was regarded as Britain’s most influential artist and, while the demand for Victorian art in general has fallen, he remains one of the few artists whose values appear to be holding up.
This has been borne out a number of times over the last 18 months, and it is something that has benefited auctioneers not just in London but across the country as good works on paper by the artist have come up in both the North and South of England. While Tennants in Yorkshire sold a pencil sketch for £36,000 last November, and Lawrences in Somerset sold a gouache for £23,000 in October 2008, probably the most desirable Burne-Jones drawing to appear at a provincial sale for a long time emerged at Cheffins’ (17.5% buyer’s premium)sale in Cambridge on March 24-25.
It was not just an incredibly beautiful sketch. Depicting the artist’s most important muse, Frances, Lady Horner (née Graham), the subject for a single Burne-Jones portrait drawing could hardly have been better.
The daughter of the Scottish MP and
art patron William Graham, Frances was only 11 when she first posed for Burne- Jones as the youthful bride in The King’s Weddingin 1870. Over the next 30 years, she went on to have an intense relationship with the artist, although it was apparently platonic.
The two exchanged letters almost daily, and she posed for several other key Burne- Jones paintings, appearing as a nymph for
Perseus and the Sea Nymphsin 1877, Eurydicein the Orpheus Pianoin 1879-80,
and as the maiden in the Maiden and
Necromancer, now known as The Wizard,
painted between 1896 and 1898. The artist also produced a number of intimate drawings of Frances of which this 101
/2 x 81 /2
in (27 x 22cm) finished brown
Above: Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Williamson, aged 12 by Antonio Mancini sold for £74,000 at Cheffins where Portrait of Frances, Lady Horner by Edward Burne-Jones, left, took £54,000.
chalk sketch at Cheffins was one. Like other depictions of Frances, she appears here in profile and, while other examples have previously been sold, none was as beautifully conceived as this one. In excellent condition, the work was thought by the auctioneers to date from around 1888, based on the fact that Frances appears to be about 30 years old. It had been in Frances’s family since it was drawn and passed to a descendant in Cambridge. Cheffins knew the picture following an insurance valuation and, after the recent death of one of the family members, it was consigned along with eight less valuable pictures.
Having everything going for it, it was no surprise to see the drawing generate both trade and private interest in the room and on the phones. Surpassing the £15,000-25,000 estimate, it finally sold to an anonymous buyer at £54,000 – a price which stands up well against the £55,000 for the larger pencil portrait study of Olive Maxse, one of Burne-Jones’ later models, sold at Christie’s in June last year. While the Burne-Jones market is very much British-based, the other high-value
work at the Cheffins sale to go seriously over estimate drew rather more overseas interest.
The portrait of Miss Elizabeth
Williamson by the Italian painter Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) had, like the Burne- Jones drawing, remained with the sitter after it was painted. She later gave the portrait to the Cambridge economist Sir Richard Stone who died in 1991 and whose descendants consigned it for sale. Elizabeth was 12 years old when the portrait was painted. She was the granddaughter of Mary Hunter, a society hostess who owned the Villa Barbaro in Venice and was friends with Henry James and Edith Wharton.
In 1902, Mary Hunter commissioned
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) to
paint her three daughters, a picture that now hangs in Tate Britain. Mancini was famously declared the
greatest living painter by Sargent and went to England on his recommendation. There, the socially awkward Italian artist was sponsored by Mary Hunter and was commissioned to paint this portrait in 1908. Indeed, he produced three portraits
of Elizabeth during his stay. The signed and dated 4ft x 2ft 2in (1.24 x 66cm) oil on canvas was in good untouched condition, although the artist’s graticola– or perspective grid – was visible.
Mancini, who invented his own working techniques, would make two grids consisting of a wooden frame with strings attached. He placed one in front of the sitter and then another over his canvas and would then paint between the blocks. Although this has meant that the grid lines sometimes appear in his finished paintings – and can be off-putting at first – picture specialist at Cheffins Sarah Flynn felt that it did not necessarily detract from the work as buyers regard it as adding a ‘quilted’ decorative quality to the surface. Few of Mancini’s portraits from this period have ever come up at auction (his earlier works from Naples have more of a track-record) and this picture was especially attractive in light of the £20,000-30,000 estimate. It generated significant interest from Italy and from UK-based Italians but was knocked down to a private British collector at £74,000.
Overall the picture section at Cheffins made £322,610 hammer with 80 per cent of the 202 lots finding buyers.
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