50 24th September 2011 antiquarian books Sales give a clearer picture
■ Strong prices for select items 25 years on from the golden age of collecting
Ian McKay reports
ORIGINAL illustrations, mostly made for children’s books, are featured in a look back at summer sales that saw mixed fortunes for one of the best loved of children’s authors, Beatrix Potter. New season sales see successes for Ole Worm’s Wunderkammer and David Ricardo’s analytical economic theories.
Potter magic casts spells with mixed results
THREE mice about to devour a Christmas pudding, the Beatrix Potter ink and watercolour drawing seen above, is one of a number of Christmas-related drawings that the author and illustrator is known to have sent to relations in the 1890s, at a time when she was producing greetings card designs for publishers Hildesheimer & Faulkner. Great Aunt Beatrix sent this one in
1893 to her nieces, Elinor and Elizabeth Lupton, and the following Christmas sent another of two rabbits with a sledge. At Sotheby’s on July 14, the two
watercolours sold at £20,000 and £18,000 respectively, but though these were low-estimate prices, they doubled the sums they brought at auction as
Left: sent as an 1893 Christmas greeting to two of her nieces, this Beatrix Potter watercolour of three mice ready to tuck into a Christmas pudding made £20,000 at Sotheby’s on July 14 – doubling its money after a five-year absence from the salerooms.
At Sotheby’s New York on June 15, ‘Jensine does the Washing’, one of Arthur Rackham’s original ink and watercolour drawings for Margery Williams Bianco’s Poor Cecco of 1925 was unsold on an estimate of $20,000-30,000, but moments earlier, ‘The Fairy- Apple Woman’, the watercolour made for Eden Philpott’s A Dish of Apples (1921) seen right, had sold for $27,500 (£17,025), against an estimate of just $8000-12,000.
Far right: one of the group of Charles Brock’s original watercolour illustrations to a 1907, Dent edition of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, sold for £6800 by Dominic Winter.
recently as 2006 in Wiltshire. These drawings and two others had been sent for auction by descendants of the Misses Lupton at Kidson Trigg’s Highworth salerooms and on that occasion they made £10,500 each. Not all Beatrix Potter lots, however,
were able to match saleroom expectations during the summer sales. In 1927, BP prepared 50 drawings to
be sold in aid of the National Trust, most of them re-worked and coloured-up versions of her original black-and-white drawings for the first, privately printed version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. One of them, “Peter was very naughty,
he ran straight away to Mr McGregor’s garden and squeezed under the gate”, captioned, signed and dated by BP, made $12,000 (£7420) at Christie’s New York on June 23. This was a little disappointing – in fact $3000 under the low estimate. This summer’s Sotheby’s sale also
offered one of only three recorded copies (one of which is incomplete) of Our Dear Relations, an 1893 Hildesheimer & Faulkner publication in which four of six chromolitho illustrations are signed H.B.P.
As with another more familiar
early example of her first work for the publishers, A Happy Pair of 1890 (a copy which was unsold on an estimate of £10,000-12,000), Beatrix Potter is here illustrating verses by Fred Weatherly. This copy, slightly soiled in the original
pictorial wrappers, sold slightly under estimate at £14,000. The only other copy seen at auction, the complete copy in the 1997 Christie’s East sale of the Doris Frohnsdorff BP collection, reached $22,000, (then £13,500). At Dominic Winter on June 16,
a copy of the 1902, second privately printed edition of
...Peter Rabbit, the olive green boards now mottled and fading to brown, sold at £8200. Over many years, E.H. Shepard happily
made copies of his illustrations to the A.A. Milne books for family and friends, and seen at Sotheby’s on July 14 was a version of ‘Tiggers don’t like Honey’ from The House at Pooh Corner that he drew seven years later, in June 1935, for Harold Scott, who had served as a gunner under Major Shepard in the Royal Artillery during the First World War. It sold at a
Left: the pictorial cover of Our Dear Relations of 1893, a very rare publication which features early work by Beatrix Potter. Sold for £14,000 at Sotheby’s.
Right: with moving parts to each of the pages (at least one defective and others possibly missing), the copy of Dogs’ Party, a Dean’s ‘Moveable’ of the 1850s (?) seen at Tennants of Leyburn on August 3 also showed some wear and tear in its pictorial boards, but it sold at £650.
“On that occasion, almost a quarter century ago, the Northanger Abbey set was easily the cheapest lot, but even so, the price was higher then than it was this summer, at £7500”
low-estimate £22,000. Much more successful in terms
of estimate was a Rowland Emett watercolour that sold for a treble- estimate £11,000 at Sotheby’s. A particularly large and fine example of his crazily inventive cartoons, this was ‘The Miracle of Automation’, cosily applied to that most critical production, early morning tea. The June 16 Dominic Winter sale also
saw a bid of £6800 on a group of 18 ink-and-watercolour drawings made by Charles Brock for a 1907, Dent edition of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. In June 1987, as part of a Sotheby’s
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