Market Preview
A rediscovered Watteau, a poetic Turner and pioneering Op Art go under the hammer this month, and London dealers present Master Drawings, including Lucian Freud’s portrait of a young criminal.
Susan Moore, Sunday, 22nd June 2008
Turner’s Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, by contrast, has been one of the most celebrated paintings in Britain for the past 250 years or so. Illustrated on page 44, its subject is the Thames-side home of one of Turner’s favourite poets, Alexander Pope; its scandalous rebuilding prompted the artist himself to pen an ode. When Turner exhibited the landscape at his Harley Street gallery in 1808, the engraver John Landseer commented that he had ‘represented with unprecedented success, the poetic hour of pensive feeling on a tranquil autumnal evening’. Bought the same year by one of Turner’s patrons, Sir John Fleming Leicester, 1st Baron de Tabley, it was acquired by the entrepreneur James Morrison in 1827 – the only time this much-exhibited canvas has appeared on the market since its initial sale. Passing down the generations, it ended up in Sudeley Castle, the home of the Dent-Brocklehurst family, who are now offering it at Sotheby’s on 9 July. Described as one of the most important of Turner’s oil paintings to appear on the market in living memory, it comes with expectations of £5m-£7m.
Sotheby’s Mario Tavela loads even more lavish praise on a gilt-bronze mounted Chinese black-and-gold porcelain pot-pourri vase and cover from the London home of the financier Dimitri Mavrommatis that is on offer in London on 8 July. ‘Arguably the most magical ormolu-mounted vase in existence’, is his verdict. Rare and unusually large scale, this piece gives perfect expression to the French passion for gilding the lily. The wulin glaze of the Qianlong period vessel is of a luminous deep black – almost mirror- black – and is ornamented in gold with circular panels of flowers and leaves with chrysanthemum-scroll broders. It was then exquisitely mounted in Paris around 1745.
What will no doubt add to its appeal is that the vase was probably made for the Turkish market, and indeed is known to have been in the palace on the Bosphorous of Ismael Pasha (1830-95), a fomer ruler of Egypt. At the end of the 19th century, it was purchased by Sir J.C. Robinson, the celebrated first curator of what became the Victoria & Albert Museum (its pair is believed to be in the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin). Better still, it has survived virtually unscathed. Over £1m is expected.
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