18 29th May 2010
auction reports
Guatelli’s happier returns
■ Unsold lots from ‘Iconic Clarice Cliff’ collection return for sale in two regional salerooms on April 14
Anna Brady
reports
BEAUTY, rarity, condition and value. These are what the Swiss Scottish-based industrialist Sevi Guatelli, termed his BRVC principles which he applied when building his superlative collection of Clarice Cliff pottery.
Such exacting standards did not come cheap, particularly as Guatelli accumulated the bulk of his collection over a two-decade period when the market for the Staffordshire designer was at its height.
Selling the ‘Iconic Clarice Cliff’ collection of a man who was previously a key buying force in the thin air at the top of the Clarice market had proved a challenge for Bond Street saleroom Bonhams in April last year. Around 40 of the 103 lots failed to sell including some trophy lots – such as the Sunspots358 vase for which Sevi Guatelli had bid a mighty £17,000 at Christie’s South Kensington in 2006. Precisely one year on and some of those unsold lots from the Guatelli sale
resurfaced with revised expectations at not one but two of the UK’s premier regional salerooms. Both Woolley &
Wallis (19.5% buyer’s premium) and Lyon & Turnbull (25% buyer’s
premium) chose April 14 as sale day but – at least where the Guatelli pieces were concerned – all found homes this time around.
Every April, Michael Jeffery, 20th century design specialist at Woolley & Wallis conducts a Clarice Cliff, Art Deco and 20th century design sale at the Wiltshire rooms. And this year’s offering, just shy of 1000 lots, was described by Jeffery as “My biggest and best ever sale at Woolley & Wallis” and netted £351,205 in total.
Highlights from the Sevi Guatelli collection of Clarice Cliff sold by two salerooms on April 14.
Left: Clarice Cliff Sunspots Bizarre 358 vase – £7500 at Woolley & Wallis. Above: Clarice Cliff Tennis twin-handled Lotus jug – £5500 at Woolley & Wallis. Above right: Red Carpet vase, from the Guatelli collection – £1250 at Lyon & Turnbull.
Five ex-Guatelli pieces opened the 70- lot selection of Clarice, topped by the SunspotsBizarre 358 vase that had been unsold with a low estimate of £7000 at Bonhams. Only 20 or so pieces in this rare and stylish pattern are known and Guatelli owned a dozen of them. Pitched here at £5000-8000, the 81
/4
in
(21cm) high vase sold to a UK collector for £7500, a good achievement for the saleroom but in real terms a third of the sum Guatelli had paid just four years ago. A 12in (30cm) high Bizarre twin- handled Lotus jug in the Tennispattern, with a minor firing fault to the top rim, also unsold at Bonhams with a low estimate of £7000, sold in the middle of a £4000-6000 estimate for £5500. A Tennis waisted-form vase, 9in (23cm) high,
A blossoming reputation for René Lalique
IT started in 2008 when a local lady vendor found a brooch in a box of bric-a-brac and, hoping to finance a knee operation, took it to see Woolley & Wallis jewellery specialist Jonathan Edwards. The brooch was in fact a cicada brooch by the French Art Nouveau designer René Lalique (1860-1945) and was sold by the Salisbury auction rooms to London dealer Wartski for £58,000 in October 2008. On the back of this sale, a Lalique dragonfly pendant was consigned to W&W in April 2009 and sold for £38,000. Mr Edwards was gaining a reputation as the man for Lalique, and in January of this year sold a brooch, decorated with dancing nymphs, for £12,000 and another dragonfly pendant for £42,000. On the strength of these sales, a New York collector consigned a diamond-set enamel pansy plaque de cou, or dog collar centrepiece, by Lalique to W&W’s latest jewellery sale on April 29. The 21
/3
in (6cm)
Above: pansy plaque de cou by René Lalique – £40,000.
wide pansy plaque was decorated with a deep blue centre detail and pave-set with circular cut diamonds in gold. It sold to Wartski’s for a top estimate £40,000, the highest price of the sale.
“Selling the collection of a man who was previously a key buying force in the thin air at the top of the market had proved a challenge”
which was one of a pair offered with an estimate of £4000-6000 at Bonhams, here proved more attractive on its own, selling at £1800 (estimate £1000-2000). The two other Guatelli items, a Shark's
TeethBizarre conical bowl and a Double V Bizarre 369 vase, sold at mid-estimate prices of £1050 and £1300 each. Mr Jeffery said that the Clarice section of the sale met with an encouragingly strong response for this changeable market, with bids coming from the UK but also South Africa, America and Australia, longstanding areas of interest in the designer. Eight pieces from Guatelli’s collection
cropped up at Lyon & Turnbull’s Decorative Arts sale in Edinburgh. An 8in (21cm) Red Carpet vase, shape 362, c.1930, with some restoration to the rim, had gone unsold at £1200 at the Bonhams sale, against hopes of £1500- 2000. This estimate was slashed here to £500-700, but it sold for £1250. Estimated at £800-1200 was a 12in
(31cm) Castellated CirclesArchaic vase,
shape 374, c.1930, which had gone unsold at Bonhams against a £1500-1800 guide but sold in Edinburgh at £1000. The six other Guatelli pieces found homes too, at prices between £650 and £960. But the Lyon & Turnbull sale, which
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