Some Take A Haircut But Art Still Selling

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday April 19, 2008

Peter Fish

Deutscher and Hackett executive director Damian Hackett sums up the current art auction climate thus: "If you want to sell and are prepared to be sensible, then there is plenty of action."

"If you want to test the market with 'experimental' estimates, you'll go down in a ball of flames," Hackett said after Wednesday's D&H sale - seen as a crucial test of the market.

Luckily, the auctioneer didn't have too many "experimental" estimates in its catalogue, but expectations on several pictures got a bit of a haircut anyway.

The catalogue cover picture, Tom Roberts's stately Practising The Minuet attracted a top bid of $260,000 - well under the estimate of $300,000 to $500,000. Including premium the buyer paid $312,000 - a record for a Roberts portrait.

The same figure was fetched by John Perceval's Lime Quarry, Lilydale, against an estimate of $200,000 to $300,000. It was again a bit short of expectations, as was Charles Blackman's Hawthorn Schoolgirl, sold at $240,000.

Nevertheless the auction, the first session of a two-day sale in Melbourne, still raised $5.05million with 78per cent of lots finding buyers. As Hackett says, "selling eight out of 10 pictures - some over, some under [the estimates] - is a very healthy feeling".

Sadly, he says, the Bertram Mackennal bronze Circe failed to sell while the sale "hit a speed bump" towards the tail end when no one seemingly wanted a host of Joy Hester ink studies.

While most of the major works were sold slightly below vendors' hopes, a few did very well. The late Pro Hart's Danila Vasilieff sculpture Superman (Nietzsche) for instance, brought $84,000, which looks good news for Bonhams & Goodman, which has a couple more to sell on Wednesday next week, while Bessie Davidson's appealing Interior With Poppies brought $156,000 and Will Ashton's powerful Victory Celebration, Martin Place brought triple the estimate at $99,000.

There were even a couple of solid prices for international artist, including a Henri Matisse drawing, Jeune Femme Assise at $132,000 and Andy Warhol's Mao at $78,000.

"It would have been terrific to see more [works] scream through their estimates," Hackett says. "But we had a packed room, lots of hands, lots of phones and committed vendors - and that made for a very good night."

HOOK, LINE AND SINKER

Angling is more than an interest for some - when it comes down to the line it's a passion. Bonhams&Goodman netted hundreds of fishing books, many of them rare specimens, for its big book sale on Monday, as well as historic volumes on other time-honoured "gentleman's pursuits" such as shootin', explorin' and er ... dogs.

Among the juiciest bait in the sale were gems like the Rev R.W.Houghton's British Fresh-water Fishes (published London 1884) and R.H.Wigram's Nymph Fishing In The Southern Hemisphere (Sydney 1939). Nymphs, in this instance, are not so much a gentleman's pursuit as dragonfly larvae.

The fishing books sold very strongly, says Bonhams & Goodman consultant Tory Page, particularly those with an Australian or Tasmanian theme.

Wigram's rare Nymph Fishing, which at 24 pages is really little more than a pamphlet, sold for $5280 - which Page thinks may be a world record.

Early Tasmanian autographical material also stood out, with a group of handwritten and signed items by the Danish adventurer and convict constable Jorgen Jorgenson fetching among the top prices at $13,200.

Only thing that worries this unfortunately named observer is how many angling books seem to have been penned by men of the cloth - to whom all life is surely sacred yet who clearly spend as much time on the riverbank as they do keeping their flock on the straight and narrow.

FINE VINTAGE FROM CLARE

Plenty more gems coming on the market for bookworms, with Australian Book Auctions in Melbourne on May 5and 6 sweeping out the contents of the Hawker family library, which gathered dust at North Bungaree Homestead, Clare, South Australia. It's one of the few remaining early family collections, begun by the pioneer settler Admiral Edward Hawker in the 1800s and continued through several generations. Many of the classic voyages and explorations are included, Cook, Dampier, Parkinson, Freycinet and so on, plus association copies and rare early works on Tasmania and the Swan River.

Among the outstanding items is a very well preserved first edition of Alexander Dalrymple's Voyages And Discoveries In The South Pacific Ocean published 1770, in a fine contemporary binding, at $10,000 to $15,000. Expected to fetch about the same money is William Dampier's A Collection Of Voyages in four volumes published in 1729. It is a racy read by the buccaneering explorer who cruised the West Indies, Chile, Peru, Tonkin, Malacca and, of course, New Holland, long before James Cook.

Another choice item on offer, though not from the Hawker library, is Cook's classic A Voyage To The Pacific Ocean in four volumes circa 1780. In contemporary calf, rebacked, it's weathered enough to have travelled with Cook himself. Now that's a voyage book.

TIME AGAIN

The contents of the Melbourne Clock Museum goes under the hammer at Bonhams and Goodman's sale on April 29.

There's a host of bracket clocks and long-case clocks - both of particular interest to the museum's founder, the redoubtable Major Griffith Brook.

King of the bracket clocks is probably the elaborate gilt mounted ebonised turntable clock by Stephen Horseman of London circa 1730, which is estimated at $22,000 to $30,000. Horseman learned his trade under the eminent Daniel Quare. A rare 18th-century satinwood bracket clock by Grimalde of London that plays tunes on 12 bells and is topped by a domed cupola carries a slightly lower estimate.

Long-cases include an early 20th-century quarter chiming clock in an elaborate mahogany case by SSmith and Son at about $22,000 and a late 17thcentury marquetry inlaid walnut clock by Stephen Wilmott at $20,000. Several 19th-century floor-standing regulators - used to set other clocks - include one that was something of a Melbourne landmark in goldrush days when it stood in the window of Thomas Gaunt in Bourke Street. These are mostly around $15,000.

Priced more to suit the working man's pocket, at $200 and upwards, are a number of spring-driven eight-day employee time recorders - bundy clocks, as we used to call them - made in the United States. Some of these saw use in International Harvester's Melbourne factory.

Melbourne-born Griff Brook joined the Australian Imperial Force in 1942 but was retired injured. He went on to serve with the British Army, and saw action in the Khyber Pass, Palestine, Korea, Malaya and Northern Ireland. Back home in 1963 he launched a printing supply company. After studying horology he started the museum in 1992, maintaining many of the clocks himself. At 85, he figures it's time to gives his eyes a rest.

PASTURES ANEW

Nomadic Rug Traders is on the move. A couple of decades ago the business, which specialises in old oriental carpets, textiles and tribal art, moved from Rose Bay to Surry Hills, then migrated across town to the rich pastures of Pyrmont, where proprietors Ross and Irene Langlands have been enjoying a largely sedentary lifestyle. Now they're packing up the ponies and the yurt for another foray. Actually, they're moving next door. But being rug dealers they're holding a massive May relocation sale, promising up to 50 per cent off. From next Saturday at 125 Harris Street.

pfish@smh.com.au

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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