Antiques Trade Gazette


5


1823 catalogue shows ‘dark arts’ of auction marketing have long history


■ Item sold for £300 in Cheltenham is reminder of notorious Fonthill Abbey sale


Roland Arkell reports


IF you thought the sometimes dark art of auction marketing was a new phenomenon,


think again. A revealing snapshot of the business


from two centuries ago was provided by a rare piece of auction ephemera sold for £300 at the Cotswold Auction Company in Cheltenham on May 1. As an incomplete copy of the 1823


Fonthill Abbey sale catalogue, it was of moderate interest. More arresting were the two tickets of entry to the sale pinned to the back page, each personally inscribed and signed by James Christie II (1773-1831) and Harry Phillips (d.1840) – both great names in the history of British fine art auctioneering. James Christie, who had assumed


management of his father’s auction house on his death in 1803, had been invited by William Beckford, deluged by debt after the collapse of the West Indian sugar market from which he enjoyed his fortune, to put Fonthill Abbey and its contents up for sale in 1822. Previously closed to visitors, the


chance to gawp at a fabled collection


Left: entry tickets to the Fonthill Abbey sale signed by James Christie II and Harry Phillips, together with Part III of Phillips' catalogue for the 1823 sale of The Valuable Library of Books…The Unique and Splendid Effects… The Pictures and Miniatures at Fonthill Abbey. The lot sold for £300 (estimate £80-100) at the Cotswold Auction Company in Cheltenham on May 1.


figure who two decades previously had resigned as senior clerk to James Christie (1730-1803) after reportedly being refused a pay rise. Since opening his own auction house


in 1796, Phillips had snatched many prestigious sales away from his ex- employer, combining business acumen with a flair for showmanship. New ways to win clients and promote


his sales had included elaborate evening receptions before important auctions. Nor was Phillips adverse to another


practice familiar to 21st century sale goers – seasoning the contents of an estate sale with merchandise from other clients. Famously, the Fonthill sale was the


subject of William Hazlitt’s scathing review of Beckford’s taste in his Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England (1824), although he had been unaware that the sale had been padded with many lots inserted by Phillips, that had never passed Beckford’s muster. “I would not disgrace my house by


within its mock-medieval halls sparked the Fonthill Fever, which saw 72,000 copies of Christie’s illustrated catalogue sold at a guinea apiece as an estimated 600 to 700 people a day visited in August and September 1822. But, having whetted the nation’s


appetite for the mother of all country house auctions, Beckford found a buyer desperate to pay over the odds for the whole kit and caboodle and promptly


Hammershøi painting makes £1.5m record continued from front page


Letter, shown on the front page, which sold for a record £1.5m (plus 25/20/12% buyer’s premium) to an international private collector, more than double the £500,000-700,000 estimate. A typical still interior scene in a muted


palette, the 2ft 2in x 23in (66 x 59cm) oil on canvas from 1899 depicts the artist’s wife and was among the first works painted by Hammershøi in Strandgade 30, his home in Copenhagen from 1898 to 1909, which was the subject of many of his interior scenes. Ida Reading a Letter was consigned


from a private collection and its market freshness contributed to the competition between three telephone bidders. It tripled the previous auction record for Hammershøi, established at Sotheby’s in 2006 for Interieur med Staffeli, Bredgade 25 (Interior with easel, Bredgade 25),


c.1910, which sold for a premium- inclusive £590,400. Nina Wedell-Wedellsborg, head of


Sotheby’s Denmark, said: “This was the perfect storm of five top-quality works from different collections supported by a wide spread of international bidders to achieve utterly exceptional prices. “All five paintings by Hammershøi sold


at Sotheby’s today were completely fresh to the market and in excellent condition. They worked well as a group, with each distinctive motif – the artist’s wife, a candlelit interior and a cityscape – so representative of Hammershøi.” Bidders came from Asia, America,


Scandinavia and Central Europe. The four other Hammershøi works sold


in the sale were Interior with Two Candles (£950,000), Ida in an Interior (£560,000), Ida Standing at a Desk (£380,000) and Strandgade with Christians Kirke in the background (£300,000).


cancelled the sale. It was thus that the vendor of the ‘Beckford’ sale of October 1823 was not William Beckford at all but John Farquhar, a Scottish gunpowder millionaire who had bought the abbey and much of its contents the previous year for £330,000. And the auctioneer who conducted


the sale was not James Christie II (who in 1823 had moved from Pall Mall to 8 King Street) but Harry Phillips, a shadowy


Chinese furniture,” he remarked later in life. “Horace Walpole would not have suffered it in his toyshop at Strawberry Hill.” As it was, Beckford, buying for his


new home in Lansdown Crescent, Bath, and his son-in-law the Duke of Hamilton, were heavy purchasers at the Fonthill sale of 1823, often paying knock-down prices in a depressed market. Plus ça change, plus c’est la


même chose...


ATG COMMENT AS reported last week, the postcard campaign launched by art dealer Niall Fairhead in a bid to raise the threshold for the Artist's Resale Right has made progress, attracting more signatories for the online petition and eliciting answers from the Intellectual Property Office (IPO). Now, we learn, personal


replies have started to arrive from the relevant Business & Enterprise department and are as disappointingly equivocal as ever. Whether the minister


responsible will show any more backbone in standing up for British business remains to be seen, but the frankly astonishing statement that nothing can be done without evidence being put forward to show the damaging effects on the


art trade beggars belief. What do they think has been laid before Whitehall time and again over the past decade, and continues to be submitted, both through the online petition and other means? On Wednesday, June 13, the


front page lead report in The Times quoted the Chancellor George Osborne as urging business leaders ”to be much more vocal in helping the Conservatives to make the case for a low tax economy and a smaller State”. As we pointed out when Prime


Minister David Cameron spoke out strongly against the financial transaction tax being proposed for the City by the EU, ARR is an exact parallel for the British art trade... all of which begs the question: Just how loud must we shout before the Government takes note?


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