£l2OO PICTURE FOR £80

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 250, 19 July 1937, Page 5

£l2OO PICTURE FOR £80

Landseer’s Drop in Value

SOME STUART RELICS i Memories of past auction triumphs are evoked by even the most ordinary picture sale at. Christie’s, says A. C. R. Carter, in the London "Daily Telegraph.” For example, when one of Landseer’s smaller canvasses, “Children of the Mist,” had fetched the modest sum of 78 guineas recently, one recalled that this picture, which had been greatly admired at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857, had realised 1150 guineas in 1875. But the owners felt that this was much too low, and the work went back to the family. Again, too, one of Edwin Long’s huge Egyptian compositions, “The Gods and Their Makers," had a last bid of 16 guineas only. Yet, jn 1882, he was alive to learn that another of his works, “The Babylonian Marriage Market” (now in the Royal Holloway College Gallery, at Egham), had brought the record-breaking price of 6300 guineas. The few English pictures and drawings which opened the proceedings belonged to the late George N. Stevens, of Virginia Water. Twenty-five years ago his Barbizon collection was dispersed, and .totalled £42,000. Then one of Millet’s classical compositions, “Oedipus Taken from the Tree,” reached 2300 guineas, afterward to be sold to a Canadian collector for £12,000 Millet, was often too poor to afford a new canvas, and this “Oedipus" was actually painted by him over a rendering of St. Jerome, which, when sent by him to the 184 G salon, was promptly rejected. The best prices in a sale totalling nearly £3400 were for two of Copley Fielding’s water-colour drawings, which realised 275 guineas.

The relics of “Bonnie Prince .Charlie’' and Flora MacDonald were offered without creating a Stuart furore. The circular paste brooch, with strands of the hair of the Young Pretender and Flora, realised £37, and the coggie (drinking vessel) of wood, used by the Prince when hiding at Alisary, South Uist, went for £23. The silver-gilt shoe buckle which he presented to Flora was bought for £l9, and the last bid for a strip of the printed gown worn by him when disguised as Flora’s spinning maid Betty Burke, was £7/10/-.

To save paper, it is now illegal in Germany for a hatter to use paper to wrap up a box containing his wares when giving or sending it to a customer.