22 2nd April 2011 auction reports At Liberty to sell
■ Surplus furniture from iconic 1920s London store raises £60,000 in Edinburgh rooms
Roland Arkell reports
FATHER and son architects Edwin Thomas and Edwin Stanley Hall are remembered primarily for the design of Liberty & Co.’s landmark oak-framed building which opened in London’s Great Marlborough Street in 1924.
Fashioned at the height of the Tudor
revival using the timbers of two 19th century battleships, HMS Hindustan and HMS Impregnable, the new building was a reflection of the Arts and Crafts values of truth to material which played such an important part in the success of the company. The vision of Arthur Lasenby Liberty
(1843-1917) was a store in which customers felt they were shopping in their own home and, to this effect, the Halls were asked to design much of the interior furnishings too. As the building approached completion, a variety of pegged oak tables and chests were produced at the firm’s workshops in Highgate. Liberty & Co. have retained a core
of these pieces for their collection: however a substantial section of this historic furniture, deemed unsuitable for modern retailing, was sold for the firm by Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull (25% buyer’s premium) on March 9.
Three pieces of furniture designed by Edwin T. and Edwin S. Hall for the Liberty & Co. store in 1924 and sold by Lyon & Turnbull on March 9. A centre table, £1450; an occasional table from the basement café, £1700, and a hexagonal centre table from the scarf hall, £1000.
Above: Della Robbia twin-handled vase from the collection of the late David Lloyd-Jones, £2600.
Some 30 of the 47 lots comprised
rectangular centre tables made in two Tudor revival styles. The example pictured here was one
of 17 to this particular pattern. Each was pierced with one of three different designs that mirror the oak panelling still on view in the store, and made in two sizes – 5ft (1.52m) and 3ft (1.22m) – in either limed or fumed oak. Estimated at between £600-1200 each, they sold reasonably for prices between £750 and
Glasgow roses
THIS classic piece of Glasgow design, a 2ft 6in (76cm) wide mahogany writing desk by Ernest Archibald Taylor, was offered by local saleroom Great Western Auctions (18% buyer’s premium) on March 19. Set with four stained glass panels of Glasgow roses and featuring a patent pull-out mechanism to the slope, it dates from around 1903. Pitched modestly at £2000-3000, it sold at
£10,000 to a Belgium buyer. Another desk to this design is illustrated in
Gerald and Celia Larner’s The Glasgow Style. This example was being sold by a Glasgow family who will shortly move to a council house purpose built to cater for two disabled family members. The money will be very welcome.
£1450 depending upon condition. Similar sums were generated by
the dozen tables to a second design with X-frame supports united by four stretchers. The spirally fluted central stretcher was inlaid to the visible ends with specimen woods. Again these were much-used pieces (some later set with brass metre-length rules that underlined their function) that sold for between £1050 and £1350. A group of occasional tables, with
octagonal tops measuring 2ft (60cm) across, were used in for a café (which no longer exists) located in the basement at Great Marlborough Street. Made to a strong design that reflects the arched buttresses and roof pendants of the building’s main atriums, archive photographs from 1924 show the tables were complemented by chairs designed by the German architect Richard Riemerschmid and powder blue teawares by Moorcroft. With over-supply not the issue it
perhaps was with the Tudor tables – here six examples were on offer – these did well, selling for prices between £1300 for a single example and a quadruple- estimate £2000 for a pair. A hexagonal centre table with
wrought-iron handles and linen-fold panels to four drawers and two cupboard
doors, was made as the centrepiece of the scarf hall at Liberty’s, the main galleried atrium of the shop. Although the estimate of £2000-3000 seemed sensible for such a well-provenanced piece, this, the last lot of the sale, was allowed to sell at a bargain £1000. A wrought iron hemispherical corona
worked with leafy scrollwork, once part of a pair of massive lights which hung in the antique carpet department, took £500, while a group of three iron quatreform pendants with scrollwork and fleurs-de-lys decoration were an affordable £150. The total for these lots was around
£60,000: another selection of Liberty furniture designed by Robert Lorimer will form part of L&T’s Scottish design sale on June 25. The opening hour of this Decorative
Arts sale was devoted to 112 lots from the collection of the late David Lloyd- Jones, a long-time lecturer at Glasgow University. His Edwardian home in the city’s Whittingehame Drive, packed to the gills with artfully placed objects sourced by regular visits to the Glasgow Barras, was a frequent subject for photo features on the theme of Celtic living. ‘Dismantled’ for sale, this broad cross-
section of late 19th and 20th century design proved happily affordable with
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