Antiques Trade Gazette

5

A late blooming in Lewes from Bloomsbury

GORRINGES are to offer for sale paintings and works of art belonging to Grace Higgens, the former housekeeper at Charleston Farmhouse, the Bloomsbury Group’s Sussex retreat.

Grace Higgens (1903-1983) joined the bohemian household of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant as a young maid in 1920, and for the next 50 years ran Charleston, becoming a close friend of the family.

The collection of 11 items, which includes paintings and ceramics by Bell and Grant, as well as a bronze bell used for summoning guests for meals (£200-400), is being sold by Grace’s son John Higgins (b.1935) at the Lewes rooms on May 13. Both John and his mother often sat for portraits, and included in Gorringes’ sale is an oil on canvas of Grace at the kitchen table by Vanessa Bell, estimated at £8000-12,000, a study for The Kitchen, 1943, which

hangs upstairs at Charleston. There is also a portrait of John Higgens painted in 1939 – one of the first works to be painted in the top studio at Charleston, which carries an estimate of £3000-5000.

Cattle and Granary (view from

Charleston), 1948, by Duncan Grant is another offering at £6000-8000, as is Roquebrune, 1960, also by Grant, given to Grace in 1960 after a trip to the South of France, where Grace, who could not swim, almost drowned after trying to join the others in the sea.

The Lewes salerooms are just a few miles from Charleston and, in September last year, Gorringes sold an archive of more than 700 letters between Helen Anrep and various members of the Bloomsbury Group for £50,000.

Contact 01273 472503 www.gorringes.co.uk

Anna Brady

Above: Grace

Higgens, the Bloomsbury

housekeeper, and

right, Roquebrune,

1960 by Duncan Grant (1885-1978), an oil painting from the collection of Grace

Higgens, estimated at £15,000-20,000 at Gorringes.

Finarte boss Corbelli handed two jail terms over finance offences

GIORGIO Corbelli, president of Italian auction house Finarte, has been given a 20-month jail sentence on charges related to financial dishonesty. The prosecution – which focuses on false book-keeping among other issues – followed his use of Finarte money to try to keep afloat a basketball team in Milan, Napoli football club, and also to buy the San Gregorio abbey in Venice. In a separate case Corbelli has also been handed a further 42 months for fraudulent bankruptcy with regard to Napoli.

This is not Corbelli’s first brush with the

law. In 2002, he and some associates were arrested concerning the sale of 300

fake paintings sold through his Telemarket TV shopping channel. After a long legal battle, they were eventually found not guilty at the end of last year. Corbelli began his rise in 1982, launching first Telemarket and then Telemarket 2, TV channels dedicated to selling art and jewellery to the masses. (He now uses the channels to sell art unsold in Finarte sales to the public, see ATGNo 1915 page 2). He subsequently acquired Semenzato

of Venice and a shareholding in Finarte, Italy’s leading auction house, which is quoted on the Milan stock market, before merging the two into a short-lived single entity, ousting Semenzato père et fils,

who set up their own auction house, San Marco, and the Porro family, who had built up Finarte (and who also set up its own auction house, Porro). The late 1980s saw Corbelli’s entry into the world of basketball (big business in Italy), and in 2000 he bought Napoli football club, but dropped it hastily when he became entangled in legal problems. Such is Italian law that being handed a jail sentence is no guarantee that he will actually ever set foot in a jail. Appeals on appeals, limits of statutes and so on may well assist him, as, in recent years, they have assisted prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Lucian Comoy

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PEOPLE

WE regret to announce the death

of Richard ‘Dick’ Kingzett on

March 2, aged 88. A well-known figure in the trade, he joined Agnew’s in 1950 continuing to work there for 60 years until his death.

He was author of the Samuel Scott catalogue raisonné and numerous articles and obituaries, and instrumental in the renaissance of German museum buying in the 1960s and 1970s. There will be a Service of Thanksgiving at St James’s Piccadilly on May 12 at 3pm. A fuller tribute will appear in a

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