BOUGHT FOR A SONG

Hawera Star, Volume LII, 25 January 1933, Page 2

BOUGHT FOR A SONG

FORTUNE FOR £3O. ORIGINAL TURNER. PICTURES. | "When a wealthy .Sydney win© merchant made a straight-oat bid of £3O in a city auction room recently for j. four small oil paintings in tarnished d frames and covered with til© dust of , ages, the bargain-hunters of the mart laughed at his prodigality and the auctioneers gasped. They gasped again last week when they learned that the r £<rt»u;p; was assAessed 'by experts' as 3 being worth not less than £SOOO. £ Each of them was an original by t the famous English artist, J. M. W. i ; Turner, whose works bang- in practically every English and Continental art s gallery of renown. Turner died in i 1851 at the age of 76, and left a ■; ill so complicated that ensuing; litigation , was protracted in a vain endeavour. not to settle a dispute, but to deter7. mine what were his true bequests. * Finally the Courts awarded £20,000 ■' to the British National Art Gallery, ■i together with 66 oil paintings, ana 11 19 000 drawings and water-colour i‘, sketches. The bulk of this amazing collection of inestimable worth to-day t is hidden away in the cellars of that >- institution. The expressed wishes or \ the great artist have seldom been sc comiiletely disregarded as have the clauses of his' will specially pi ovnl'ns, for the creation of a Turner gallery. FROM OLD HO'AIE. r Greater masterpieces have not been s discovered in Australia for many years, n They found their way to the auction ._ rooms from the dusty lumber rooms of P a very old estate —and apart from the f original buyer it is likely that no one p knew their real worth. It is the opinion c of experts in the trade of renew'ing old I paintings that fear of a woman’s bitb ing scorn has forced such works into II the limbo 'of forgotten things. “Confessions” made to them reveal “ that art collectors very often are v afraid to tell their wives the sum paid y for good pictures. “Vei*y frequently,” i, said one of the experts, “a man buys r, a valuable picture, and when he goes .s home he casually tells' his wife that lie ,s bought it for £5 or so. Had he said e that he paid from £2OO to £500; for ? one, he would have got into -boiling ). water for ‘such awful extravagance’ e and been reminded that many more practical things were wanted in the / home. ■’ i “In that way,” he added, “nobody I but the buyer knows the value of the possession, and when father dies the faded; work is thrown into a back room till the old home passes into the hands of the auctioneer.” The buyer of the oils, each of which iis not more than 12in. square, will not disclose his name “because of annoyance and pestering by buyers.” AlY ready, he said, agents .for buyers had . come over from. Alelbourne in the 1 ope ” of locating the owner, and hundreds F in the trade were anxiously seeking to ’ buy. • The works were originally brought to e Australia by Dr. AVright, whose estate recentlv was sold, following the reI sumption of his premises in Wynyard Square for railway purposes. f; A TRICK HE KNEW. , e Turner had a habit of working his ' palette knife as a brush, in putting raised and bizarre effects into lii-s ’ erevases, and this peculiarity caught k the eve of the 'buyer. Tn allowing the '■ '-Sim” to photograph his four Tiir- ’ ners, this wealthy collector told how ’ he came to buy them. ’ “I was -standing with my .wife II among the crowd at the au’etion sale, ■\ when I chanced to look at four dusty 1 old relics, one of which had a- hole e through what later proved to he the roof of the Doge’s palace at Venice. I ’ said to my wife, ‘I am sure those four ’ are by Turner,’ and she replied. ‘Oh, t-liev could not he,’ but I bought them, and a; Sydney expert proved me right ’’ when he started to clean them up.”