52 19th June 2010 antiquarian books A package deal around
■ How artists, antiquarians and mapmakers have pictured Britain
■ …and a trip with Daniell and Ayton is now a lot cheaper
Ian McKay reports
Left: ‘The Entrance to Portreath, Cornwall’ from the set of Ayton & Daniell’s A Voyage Round Great Britain sold at Sotheby’s for £11,000.
Below left: ‘The Eligug-stack, near St Gowans-head, Pembrokeshire’ from the copy of A Voyage... sold by Bloomsbury Auctions for £13,000.
TAKING as its starting point a much admired classic of English topography on the grand scale, but one which has fallen in value over recent decades, this week’s report focuses on the British countryside and coast, its fashionable cities and county towns, great houses. It also includes examples of city and county maps. In fact, this report is its own Voyage Round Great Britain.
“SUCH a succession of beautiful plates is scarcely to be found anywhere... unsurpassed both in delicacy of drawing and tinting,” wrote one admirer of William Daniell & Richard Ayton’s A Voyage Round Great Britain, and one bibliographer, Tooley, called it “the most important colour plate book on British topography”. There is no doubt that this monumental collection of more than 300 coloured aquatints is a major work, but it is also one that is cheaper now than it was ten, 20 or even 30 years ago – and that is without taking all those years of inflation into account. Take, for example, an occasionally spotted, but generally fine, example seen
Right: ‘Assembly Rooms’, one of 18 mounted coloured aquatints on india paper that make up R.Woodroffe’s oblong quarto Series of Views in the City of Bath of
c.1840. There was some spotting and a few tears, both restricted to the margins, but this copy in torn pictorial
wrappers was only the second that Bloomsbury Auctions could trace at auction in the last 25-30 years. The last made £220 at Phillips in 1982; this one sold at £4800 in their May 27 sale. I thought I had seen a third, but cannot now find a record.
make at auction 30 or so years ago. In 1985, one Daniell Voyage Round Great Britainactually reached £23,000. That one was a bit special, being armorially bound for the Marquess of Stafford, and another which made £21,000 at King Street in 1988 was Ayton’s own. Nevertheless, there is no escaping the fact that prices from £15,000-20,000, before the addition of premiums, were once the norm.
at Sotheby’s on May 6. The eight parts of 1814-25 were bound as four volumes in period morocco gilt with spine titles of Daniell’s British Coast Sceneryand, more significantly, with the plates bound together in one run at the end, thus avoiding the risk of offsetting of text. That set made a mid-estimate
£11,000. Then, on May 27, Bloomsbury Auctions offered another set, this one showing some light soiling and offsetting but generally clean internally and bound as four volumes in contemporary diced russia (since rebacked).
That set was bid up to £13,000 – but this is the sort of price that sets could
In more recent times, the work has sometimes proved difficult to shift, and many sets have struggled to reach five figures without help from ever-increasing premiums. However, as the illustrations on these pages show, the work has lost nothing of its original dramatic charm. A plate from one rare set of Bath views
by R. Woodroffe, which sold for £4800 at Bloomsbury Auctions on May 27, is illustrated on the facing page. That sale also saw a bid of £4200 on an 1806 folio collection of views of
Bath...by the painter John Claude Nattes – in this instance in a modern chestnut morocco gilt binding by the local firm of Bayntun Rivière. Principally comprising 28 coloured aquatints, this is a work that Abbey reckons had only a limited circulation. These two Bath lots, along with the Daniell & Ayton Voyageand the Isle of Wight, Wales and Birmingham works described and/or illustrated in this report, were among books from the library of Crowe Hall, a Regency-style mansion in
Left: ‘The Needles and Freshwater Lighthouse’ and ‘Freshwater Bay’, two views from the concertina-style Isle of Wight Navigator of c.1820 – £4600 at Bloomsbury Auctions on May 27.
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