78 13th November 2010 letters to the editor INTERVIEW ivan macquisten email: editorial@atgmedia.com Defi nitely not Cecil


SIR - Family traditions often have more than a grain of truth and the painting sold at Halls (ATG Oct 30th) for £326,000 could well have come from Hanbury Hall, Worcestershire. But it cannot have been commissioned by Henry Cecil as conjectured since he was but ten years old when Wootton died. Henry Cecil went on to marry Emma Vernon, the Hanbury heiress whose forbear, Bowater Vernon, spent money with Wootton on


several occasions, including £108 18s 0d on September 9th, 1734, as records of his account at Goslett’s Bank make clear. The National Trust, which was


bequeathed Hanbury in 1940, already owns two of the nine known versions of this picture so decided against entering the fray for a third.


Jeffrey Haworth NT Curator, Midlands


Alarm call for sleepers Sir – This week I tried to get a phone


bid on a lot with a £200-£300 estimate. The auctioneers refused, saying that their policy was to restrict phone bids to lots with a bottom estimate of £300. I offered to leave a £300 bid on the


books in exchange for a phone bid but that was not accepted, leaving me with the prospect of a 250-mile round trip for one lot. After a lot of badgering the auctioneers fi nally reluctantly agreed to


revise the estimate to £300-£500 (thus preserving their 'policy') and give me my bid. The lot made £17,000 plus premium, a total of just over £20,000. This is the umpteenth time this year I have had this problem. It is time that auctioneers accepted that they may have a general basic knowledge but cannot compete with specialist dealers in their own fi elds.


Ray Norman, Hemingstone


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❏ Fifty years on,


■ ANNA BRADY talks to Giuseppe Eskenazi about his 50 years at the centre of the Chinese art trade in London


AS a young man, Giuseppe Eskenazi’s ambition was to deal in Old Master pictures, but his family promptly quashed that idea. They told him he was 200 years too late to make any money in the fi eld, so he joined the family Oriental art business, which had been founded in Milan in 1923 and was then run by his uncle Vittorio. Born in Italy, in 1952 Giuseppe was


sent to school in England and in 1960 he and his late father opened a London offi ce for the fi rm. Their primary aim was to organise a supply of works of art to the gallery in Milan, but the move proved rather more historic than that. This year the London gallery celebrates


its 50th anniversary and the fi rm’s imposing six-storey Mayfair headquarters on Clifford Street is conspicuous proof that Giuseppe’s willingness to take, in his words, a “calculated risk”, has paid off. “I started sticking my neck out at


auction when I was young. It was risky, but luckily it worked and often I then sold the piece to the underbidder,” he explains. “Sometimes I couldn’t sell something for a while, but mostly I could.” Nowadays he is well known for his


bold bidding at auction and he is pictured here with the blue and white porcelain Yuan dynasty guan which he bought for £14m on behalf of a client at Christie’s in July 2005. But does saleroom pressure get to


him? He allows a wry smile: “I don’t get


nervous, but I do get competitive. Often my son, Daniel, has to stop me and sometimes he has to pull my hand down quite forcefully.” Giuseppe notes that the Chinese


market has changed enormously over the past 50 years and he has witnessed numerous buying chapters, starting with the post-Second World War generation of English collectors such as Sir Percival David. “This fi zzled out in the ‘60s, but then


in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Japanese market developed and they were buying [Chinese] art which infl uenced that of their own country, and forming museums,” he says. “The Japanese dictated the market for


a long time, but this halted around 1990 when their economy suffered.” Whilst East Coast American


museums, such as the Cleveland and the Metropolitan, were also once powerful buyers, their capacity to compete against


Mainland Chinese buyers is now hindered by funding problems. He explains that it was the Japanese and the American museums that drove a market for “classical, obvious ceramics, bronzes and sculpture...for instance, Song period ceramics.” Today, the dominance of Chinese


buyers is fuelling the astronomical prices for what Giuseppe sees as “more ‘gaudy’, ornately decorated porcelain and enamelled pieces – the later Imperial works, and those connected to the Qing Emperors are most desirable.” But he thinks a predilection for earlier


works, currently prized more by Western collectors, will in time develop as a parallel taste among the Chinese, whilst not replacing their Imperial fondness. He insists that the recurring question


of a dwindling supply of stock is overstated: “People have always said there is never enough supply. Everyone said to me – more experienced dealers when I fi rst started in the ‘60s – that the Japanese were going to buy everything.” But he didn’t listen and he turned out


to be right. “When their economy collapsed the


Japanese had to sell back on to the market. Things will always come back on the market eventually and high prices make people sell,” he explains. But Giuseppe, a co-founder of Asian


Art in London, has long been a vocal champion of London as a centre of the Asian art market and he is now concerned about the effect of the fl ow of pieces back into China. “It is defi nitely one way, very little is


being kept back. It is a worry,” he says. But he recognises that this threat to


London’s position is nothing new. “In 1973, Julian Thompson from


Sotheby’s saw the future of the Hong Kong market and Sotheby’s set up over there. At fi rst the auctions were not so important, but they developed a market where the local collectors trusted an old English company,” he remembers. Giuseppe feels this was to the


detriment of London. “Some objects were sent over there for sale that defi nitely should have stayed in London,” he believes. “Buyers like coming over here to buy, and when they take an object home, it is like a trophy.” In the past, Eskenazi has always bid on


behalf of Western collectors at auction – for objects such as the Qianlong jade buffalo bought at £3.4m for an American client at Woolley & Wallis last year.


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