17 NOVEMBER 1967, Page 21

Bond St barometer

ART PAUL GRINKE

Almost hidden and certainly overshadowed by the splendours of the Turner exhibition at Agnew's is a roomful of rather dusty relics from the past. They are worth a lingering glance as reminders of the firm's genesis and gradual elevation to its present princely status as one of the great merchant houses of Bond Street. The larger exhibition commemorates Turner and the firm's 150th anniversary, the smaller is a discreet pat on the back in the form of a flick through the family album.

The firm began life, auspiciously enough, as Zanetti and Agnew's Repository of Arts, a re- sounding title which must have gone down well in the Manchester of the 1820s. Their stock in trade included barometers an.d other elegant domestic appliances; Thomas Agnew seems to have been a solid citizen, doubling as Mayor of Salford and Commissioner of Police and Public Parks. As publisher he deserves our heartfelt thanks for sending Roger Fenton with his superb photographic van to record the Crimean War and Francis Frith to capture the Middle East on collodion plates.

Later in the century Agnew's moved to Lon- don and opened a grand Bond Street emporium in Great Exhibition style. The barometers faded into the background and serious picture dealing took their place. The rumbustious William Agnew was one of the first of the great picture entrepreneurs. At a Manchester dinner for his colleagues he said in an unguarded moment 'Anybody can sell good pictures to people who want them and some people can sell good pic- tures to people who don't want them, but I, William Agnew, can sell bad pictures.to people who don't want them.'

Meanwhile, prices for good and bad alike had quintupled in twenty-five years: in the sale rooms and on varnishing day at the Academy the Agnew partners usually swept the board. In his catalogue introduction Mr Jail gives some interesting reflections on Turner prices, always intimately linked with Agnew's for- tunes. In 1863 major Turner oils were already averaging £2,000 apiece, the contemporary price of Reynolds's portrait of Mrs Hartley and child, a pair of Gainsborough portraits or, if you had held back for three years, somewhat more than Constable's Hay Wain.

The most evocative exhibit is a case of browned letters and tatty strips of canvas, the debris of the Duchess, of Devonshire scandal. Gainsborough's Duchess of Devonshire was bought by Agnew in 1876 for over £10,000, the record price for an English painting, and quickly removed from their premises with great aplomb by Adam Worth, a gentleman crook who placed it in a Brooklyn depository. No ex- tradition treaty was in force and for twenty-five years discreet negotiations were conducted be- tween the Agnews and Worth through The Times agony column. When Worth felt their interest flagging he sent strips of the canvas liner as an hors-d'oeuvre. The Duchess was finally restored in 1901. WortIll received his promised immunity plus a £1,000 reward and retired to his yacht; Agnew's passed the picture on to Pierpont Morgan for over 00,000. A quarter of a century to conclude one deal gives some measure of the stately plod of business at the turn of the century.