10 19th June 2010 london selection With porcelain in particular,


■ Sale series shows just how sensitive bidders are to estimates


Anne Crane reports


LAST month saw plenty to bring collectors of Continental porcelain to London with three substantial properties on offer in the salerooms. Two were devoted predominantly to Meissen and the third to Vincennes and Sèvres. ATG look at how they performed and analyses some of the major market trends.


THE late spring contribution to the Continental porcelain stakes at Christie’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) was a double helping on May 12. Morning and afternoon sessions from two different properties were offered under the coverall title White Gold. This is a reference to the high, almost mythical, status and value of the earliest Continental productions. (Böttger, who founded the Meissen factory for Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, was originally, it will be remembered, an arcanist employed to turn base metals into gold, but the porcelain-obsessed Elector was equally keen to crack the secret of Oriental porcelain). It was a day of two sales and, paraphrasing footballspeak, a game of two halves. The morning session – 171 lots of Meissen and Du Pacquier collected over the past 40 years by Dr Roy Byrnes, an American diagnostic histopathologist – was a near sellout, with just 16 lots left behind.


By contrast, the afternoon session – some 80 lots of Sèvres and Vincennes,


The 81


in (22cm) high bottle vase, far left, painted with a profusion of Oriental flowers, an AR monogram, and Dreher’s mark to the base, topped Bonhams’ second sale from the Hoffmeister collection on May 26, when it sold just over the top end of a substantial £80,000- 100,000 estimate at £110,000 after a brief two-way phone skirmish.


Left: impressive sculptural pieces that combined fashionable, Oriental-inspired decoration with Augustus Rex provenance were the unsurprising leaders of the two London collections of Meissen offered in London last month. /2


in (44cm) high underglaze blue Chinese-style baluster vase, left,of c.1725 with Augustus Rex monogram and inventory number 310. It is one of only three known, the other two being in the Arnold collection and the Dresden


/2


Dr Roy Byrnes’ collection at Christie’s on May 12 was led by this impressively tall 171


Porcelain collection. It doubled its estimate to take £100,000 from a collector.


offered with no vendor information but widely known in the trade to be one private collection – was much more of a struggle with just under half left unsold. True, these were different factories


with different emphases. Dr Byrnes’ holdings, which had been put together with the help and guidance of dealers like Robert Williams and, latterly, Errol Manners, showed an eye for the unusual and interesting rather than for tick-box trophies in pitch-perfect condition. The anonymous afternoon property charted the production history of early Vincennes and Sèvres from the 1740-90s, with an emphasis on pieces whose provenance could be traced through the factory archives and subsequent sale, through marchands merciers or auctions. It was thought in the trade to have been put together under the guidance of the Paris dealer Vandermeersch (whose name certainly cropped up frequently in the recent provenance). There was a noticeable leaning toward big-ticket


Vincennes “form” pieces and sculptural white figure groups. But setting aside these differences, the


main reason for the difference in response was primarily down to pricing. Dr Byrnes’ collection, consigned from outside the EU, attracted an extra five per cent payable on the hammer price, had very realistic guidelines. “We estimated it at what we thought was sensible to give him the best possible result,” said Christie’s Dominic Simpson. The Sèvres and Vincennes estimates, on the other hand, pushed the envelope much more and were rather more of a gamble. The clientele responded accordingly.


There was a full room for the sale of the Byrnes collection: trade and private collectors from the UK, Germany and further afield joined with phone competition to give what Dominic Simpson termed a really “fizzy” atmosphere, especially for the first half. The £841,380 total was very comfortably in excess of their predictions of


Left and right: two coffee cups and saucers from the same service bearing the arms of Carlo Albani and Teresa Borremeo and perhaps made as a diplomatic gift for the Crown Prince of Saxony’s Grand Tour to Italy, turned up in the May auctions. The version on the left came up in the Byrnes collection at Christie’s. It has a restored rim chip and associated crack to the beaker and minute rim chip to the saucer, plus minute wear and flakes to the gilding and painting and sold for £5000 against a £2500-4000 estimate. The example right featured in the Hoffmeister sale at Bonhams. It has a restored rim chip to the beaker and sold for £6000 against a £5000-7000 estimate.


£478,700-£723,500. When it came to the afternoon, buyers


were much more selective and prepared to let things that were not one-off purchasing opportunities lie fallow till another occasion. The turnout was small – just a handful of trade and privates – and most of the action was on the telephone. It was noticeable that Jody Wilkie, Christie’s international ceramics head, was manning one particularly busy line for paddle 814, who turned out to be a prominent buyer.


In situations like these the big rooms hope they can draw on their extensive client list to entice customers in other fields into some crossover bidding. Perhaps that was the case with some of the afteroon’s phone bidders, although one suspects that the majority of the pieces went to established ceramics collectors. Certainly, this was not entry-level material in pricing terms and requires a level of understanding of the subject, or


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