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EDITOR’S NOTES
A fisherman’s tale
It occurred to me the other day – and not for the first time – that those of us who try to track down sleepers at auction sales are not unlike fishermen.
You have the favourite haunts that you return to again and again; you sit motionless for hours hoping you will get a bite and that, leaping into action at a moment’s notice, you will be able to reel in ‘the big one’; you subsist on coffee and sandwiches; you know that despite your best efforts you may not land the thing you want; you accept that sometimes you may have an entirely wasted journey and come away with nothing, while those around you make a mighty haul. And none of it matters because, good luck or ill, you know you will return to the river again and again, even if it is more in hope than expectation.
And then there are the yarns you will tell: stories about your extraordinary guile and brilliance; tales of your amazing good fortune and unlikely triumphs (although you will rarely mention the thing you landed thinking it was going to get your photograph in the local paper when it turned out, on closer inspection, to be no more than a minnow). Less often, but with almost as much relish, you will tell the story about ‘the one that got away’. And with every telling, the story will get longer and the extraordinary quarry that escaped your net will grow in size and value. Believe me, I know. I’ve told a few; and as well as telling them myself I have heard about many others.
So when I’m not trying to net wonderful things myself (and when I’m not relaxing in the bar parlour swapping unlikely-but-true stories about fabled quarry) I can often be found reading about the extraordinary sleepers that other people have managed to land.
One of my favourite books is Philip Mould’s Sleepers: In Search of Lost Old Masters. In this book, Mr Mould (an Antiques Roadshow regular) recounts the stories of paintings that turned up in odd places after decades, or sometimes centuries, of neglect, were recognised as something special by someone with an eagle eye and were snapped up for a song. He relates stories of lost Constable sketches, of forgotten contemporary portraits of George Washington, of unknown 500-year-old royal portraits and unloved garden sculptures that went on to make millions.
I have always enjoyed this volume. Together with the reminiscences of a gentleman named Stowers Johnson (Collector’s Luck and Collector’s World), it is as close to top-shelf literature as books about old paintings and antiques get (especially if you take Colette’s novella of Yvette, the Saucy Tapestry Expert and the 1970s Amorous Auctioneer series of books by ‘Gavel-basher’ out of the equation).
Minor sleepers are by no means uncommon. I have bought a number of modest examples myself in the past: a Burne-Jones drawing for a fiver, an architectural watercolour by the great Robert Adam for the same amount, a £10,000 watercolour by David Cox for the equivalent of £40, a John Thirtle watercolour bought from a prestigious art gallery in Petworth for £100 and worth at least 50 times that amount (see May 2007 GAN for that story), a rare and valuable lithograph by Odilon Redon for a few pounds at a south Norfolk sale and… and I could go on, but you’ve got the idea by now.
Still, while I have been very pleased with these and other finds, the big, flashy oil paintings that have been lost for centuries have eluded me thus far. In other words, to go back to the fisherman analogy, you could say that I have landed some good fish in my time but ‘the big one’, the legendary pike that haunts the deep pool near Five Acre Field, has never been on the end of my line… until last week.
I was browsing an online catalogue for a South Coast picture sale when I came across it: “Attributed to Sir William Hamilton, oil on panel, allegorical scene.” It showed a young woman in a royal palace of some kind, waving her arms in a slightly loopy matter at a distracted youth in a crown while a couple of flunkies did their best to restrain her. There were a number of other people in the room and all of them looked pretty gloomy and displeased with the girl’s antics.
If you are looking for early English pictures, two things will really help. The first is a basic knowledge of English topography.
Being able to recognise the principal ports, mountains, castles and ruined abbeys of Britain can provide vital clues as well as making items more saleable if you are selling on. If you recognise Haddon Hall in an unsigned, untitled watercolour for example, you may have discovered a forgotten watercolour by David Cox. If you can spot Stoke-by-Nayland church in a drawing or oil sketch, you could have happened upon a lost masterpiece by John Constable.
The second thing that will help, especially when looking for figure subjects, is being reasonably conversant with British history, the Bible and some of the key works of English literature – particularly Shakespeare.
Because what the saleroom had described as “an allegorical scene” was clearly an illustration from Hamlet, depicting the bit where the Prince’s old love Ophelia goes bonkers, talks dirty, gets on everyone’s nerves and decides to go and drown herself. (Cole’s Notes? Pah!) The distracted youth in the picture was Hamlet himself and to his right was his murderous uncle, Claudius, looking none too pleased by the turn of events. The picture itself was exquisitely painted and, judging by the style, was evidently from the late C18th/early C19th.
When professional artists painted Shakespearian scenes at that time, it was often so that they could be copied by an engraver and issued as prints. I knew that William Hamilton had painted Shakespearian scenes for the publisher Boydell in around 1800, but a search through my various reference books yielded no mention of the scene before me. Neither did searching for William Hamilton via Google Images.
But what if the saleroom had got the artist wrong? That was quite possible. So I put ‘Hamlet and Ophelia’ into Google Images instead and eventually – holding my nerve as dozens of images of school plays passed before my eyes – I had a hit; one might even say a palpable hit…
On the screen was an image of the same scene depicted in my oil, but the image was of an engraving, not a painting. The legend stated that the print had been engraved by Legat and copied from a work not by William Hamilton but by Benjamin West (1738–1820), an artist so important that he became President of the Royal Academy.
Generally, 99 times out of 100 when you see what claims to be an original work and a print of exactly the same subject, the ‘original’ has been copied from the print, not the other way round. But the great quality of the oil and the rather poor quality of the print – to say nothing of some crucial differences between the two (changes and embellishments that someone doing a simple copy of the print would not have made) meant that the oil in the forthcoming sale was, without doubt, the image from which the engraver had worked over 200 years before. Was this conclusive proof that the oil the South Coast saleroom had was a genuine sleeper by a very important artist? The quality of the piece argued strongly in its favour, but was there anything else?
Happily, the Internet page I had found was arguably the most informative and useful that anyone searching for a sleeper has ever chanced upon. In the first place, remarkably, it quoted a contemporary review of the original painting, written at the time the work was originally exhibited. This is what the critic in The Examiner had to say when he saw the piece in 1805.
“[Ophelia is] robed in white; her flaxen locks hang in loose disorder over her forehead and down to her waist; with her left hand extended she carelessly strews around the rue and thyme; her eyes exhibit a wandering mind and delicious indecisiveness, yet she is gentle; rage makes no part of her character.”
Spot on. That describes the figure in the South Coast oil perfectly. But surely that would describe the figure in the engraving equally well? No. That was the wonderful thing. The engraving was unlike the oil in a number of respects. Crucially, the engraver had turned Ophelia’s face so that she looked out of the picture at the viewer and not at Hamlet. Moreover, the subtle look of “delicious indecisiveness” in the oil had been replaced with a crude mask of downright stupidity in the print. The oil was clearly the basis of the print, but evidently Legat the engraver had made a complete hash of the job. And that’s not just my opinion. Amazingly, the website quoted Benjamin West’s own feelings on the matter:
“[According to quoted source Friedman] West was unhappy with the Boydell engraving by Legat. He felt it was stilted and did not adequately capture the motion and spirit of his original.”
Again, spot on.
And then finally, this: “The original painting by Benjamin West was bought by a Mr Felton in 1805 and shipped to America to be exhibited at the museum in Philadelphia, but the whereabouts of the canvas is now unknown.”
Now, could that be any better for the hunter of sleepers? A fine, mysterious C18th painting in a provincial sale, a contemporary critic’s opinion of an important picture which perfectly matched the description of that painting, a contemporary engraving that was a variation on the picture and which identified the original artist, the original artist’s opinion of the print, remarking on the unwelcome changes made by the engraver, the statement that the oil had been lost for 200 years…
I mean, throw in a fat guy with a beard and some presents and you’ve got Christmas.
So there it was. An important picture by an important artist, lost for fully two centuries. Valued by the saleroom at £100–£200, I reckoned that, properly restored, it would be worth somewhere north of £20,000 in the right sale and something above £80,000 in a Bond Street gallery.
I booked my phone bid and waited.
On the day of the auction, the bidding started at £100 and I joined in at £120, but when the price grew to £1,800 I knew that I was beaten. My Benjamin West oil of Hamlet and Ophelia, my lovely little sleeper, sold for a little over £2,000: modest enough, given its importance and potential value, but too rich for me. I don’t know whether the winning bidder had followed the same processes I had when deciding to bid and I don’t even know if they knew the identity of the artist – if not, they wouldn’t have been the only one.
“Gosh that flew!” said the saleroom assistant who had been bidding in the room for me as my (beloved) picture was knocked down to my (now hated) rival and we were saying our adieux.
“Yes,” I said, feeling ever so slightly vindictive, “that’s because it was by Benjamin West.”
“Really?” she squeaked. “But we didn’t have it down as that!”
“I know,” I said as I gently replaced the handset on its cradle. “I know…”
Good luck!
Stuart Maclaren
Editor