50 23rd June 2012 art market Is the Victorian love story


■ Asian buyers pursue trophy lots, but a full-blown revival in demand still seems distant


Gabriel Berner reports


A HANDFUL of key consignments gave a big boost to Christie’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) recent sale of Victorian and British Impressionist art in London.


The top three lots contributed half of


the £6.7m sale on May 31 at the King Street saleroom. The decline in demand for Victorian


art over the last decade has been well documented on these pages. Once a sought-after commodity supported by a coterie of big spenders, Victorian pictures have since fallen out of fashion and struggled to compete with high growth markets such as Contemporary art. Today, low selling rates are a common theme, mainly as a result of extremely selective buying and high reserves insisted upon by unrealistic vendors hoping to for a return on works purchased when the market was buoyant. It hasn’t all been bad news, however.


Recent notable triumphs have included The Finding of Moses by Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema (1836-1912), which sold for a phenomenal $32m (£20.9m) at Sotheby’s New York in 2010, which suggests there are a few new deep- pocketed buyers (namely in Asia) willing


to spend enormous sums, although it appears so far that such results have done little to kick-start a Victorian art market revival. Comprising 107 lots, the sale at


Christie’s was just 60% sold by lot but a far more encouraging 87% by value. The sale-topper was a previously unpublished portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) of his greatest muse, Jane Morris, William Morris’ wife. The work had been in a private Scottish


collection for the past century, probably acquired by the great-grandfather of the present owner in the 1880s. In oil, measuring 22 x 18in (57 x 47cm) and in the artist’s original frame, The Salutation of Beatrice depicted Rossetti’s model in the guise of Beatrice Portinari, the Florentine girl who represented the ideal of spiritual love for the Italian poet Dante. Christie’s estimated the work at


£1m-1.5m, a UK private buyer securing


it in the room for £1.9m against keen interest from two phones. The price is a hefty new auction record for an oil on canvas by the artist, which do not appear often on the market, especially in such good condition and completely market-fresh. The previous high was an unfinished head of Proserpine which sold at Christie’s in their corresponding sale last year for £75,000. The top price for a Rossetti remains Pandora, the pastel work which sold in the same rooms in 2000 to the London trade for £2.4m. The only other work offered in the


sale with a seven-figure estimate was Lord Frederic Leighton’s (1830-96) Bacchante, painted towards the end of the artist’s life in 1892. Depicting a female follower of Bacchus clad in ivy leaves and a tiger skin playing with a pet fawn, it is a somewhat romanticised view of a follower of the god of wine who were more often depicted as debauched revellers by other artists,


At £480,000, more of a class act than the Marquess


IN an attempt to rejuvenate their traditional Victorian, Edwardian and Irish art sales, Sotheby’s have broadened the scope to include sporting and marine pictures and retitled them British and Irish Art. The first of these took place on May 10


in London. The sale-topper was a William Orpen


(1878-1931) portrait of Rose Boote, the performing West End Gaiety Girl whose marriage to Geoffrey Thomas Taylour, 4th Marquess of Headfort, caused a sensation in Edwardian society. Measuring 4ft 2in x


Left: Portrait of Rosie, Fourth Marchioness of Headfort, by Sir William Orpen – £480,000 at Sotheby’s British and Irish art sale.


3ft 2in (1.28m x 97cm), the market-fresh portrait of the Marchioness sold just under its top estimate for £480,000 to fine art dealer Guy Morrison on behalf of a private collector. However, a smaller and more informal portrait of her husband, also by Orpen, failed to find a buyer at £60,000-80,000. Nevertheless, there were promising signs for the Irish market, with Irish paintings making up half of the top ten lots here. The Edmund Blair Leighton (1852-


1922) canvas God Speed was the sale’s other high price. The 5ft 3in x 3ft 9in (1.60 x 1.16m) depiction of a distressed damsel bidding farewell to her knight had been exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1900. It has become a familiar image on


the auction scene, having appeared at Christie’s in June 2000, where it sold to collector Jerome Davis for a premium- inclusive £707,750. It then sold well below that sum in 2007 at Sotheby’s New York, when it took $900,000 (£450,000). It struggled to generate any serious competition here either, but did get away on bottom estimate for £400,000, selling to a European private client. The sale had its fair share of casualties,


including Joan of Arc by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) at £250,000-350,000 and A Birthday Picnic by Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) at £400,000-600,000. This contributed to the low selling rate, with just 52% despatched by lot and the same by value.


Left: The Salutation of Beatrice by Dante Gabriel Rossetti – £1.9m at Christie’s.


Right: Bacchante by Lord Frederic Leighton – £1m at the same Victorian and British Impressionist art sale.


“The decline in demand for Victorian art over the last decade has been well documented on these pages”


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88