NOtes fOr 'Art Collectors - Tan new season of art sales
has begun quietly. But the astonishing price of 2,500 guineas paid for a woman's portrait by Jordaens at Christie's on January 31st shows that the experts are wide' awake and the collectors ready to pay anything for a good example even of a second-rate painter who is now fashionable in America. The forthcoming auctions are going to test the popularity of several English artists. As to one of them there is little doubt. Ben Marshall's faithful and homely portraits of race-horses are now in high favour. His " Grimalkin" brought 3,100 guineas last December, and when his " Priam," the Derby winner of 1880, is put up at Christie's a fortnight hence it should certainly excite eager competition. The National Gallery Trustees are being urged to buy it, as a typical English picture.
The engaging George Morland is to be represented in the Barnet Lewis sale at Christie's on February 28th by twenty-nine examples. Last year 8,800 guineas were paid for his " Dancing Dogs," and several of the pictures now offered are at least as attractive as that—notably the " Morning : nigglers preparing for Market " which at the Huth sale of 1905 was lmocked down for 2,000 guineas, the highest price ever paid , aid up to that time for a Morland. " Blind Man's Buff ' and The Country Stable " are well known from Ward's prints, and " The Wreckers," a clever coast scene, • has been exhibited more than once. Morland's contemporary, the Rev. Matthew Peters, R.A., is now at last enjoying the reflected glory of his great colleagues, and it is possible that his " Lydia " — a languishing minx — may fetch a substantial sum.
The late Mr. Barnet Lewis was an enthusiastic admirer of that very capable and industrious craftsman Birket Foster. He collected Foster's painstaking water-colours for many years and at last had no fewer than 116 examples, all of which are to be sold on March 3rd. They include numerous views of well-known places at home and abroad, technically remark- able in their microscopic delicacy, and many rustic scenes. The outcome will be awaited with some anxiety by those collectors who, ten years or so back, paid large prices for their Fosters. The market for this class of work is none too large nowadays, and the mass of drawings offered at one time may not be easily absorbed. The shrewd collector, of course, never buys too many exainples of any one painter of second or third rank. Twenty years ago there was a man who bought virtually every picture painted by the late E. J. Gregory.. The difficulty of disposing of the Staats Forbes collection of the Barbizon school--Corots and Rousseaus and Daubignys by the score, if not the hundred—is still remembered by the older dealers.
To pass from small things to great, the celebrated Lansdowne marbles are to be dispersed at Christie's on March 5th. This historic collection, mainly formed in the eighteenth century when wealthy Englishmen made the Grand Tour and felt it incumbent on them to bring back a few spoils from Italy and Greece, is of the first importance for Greek sculpture. Two of the pieces are especially well known to students. One is a beautiful copy of the " Amazon " made by Polyclitus for the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus—whose Votaries clamoured against St. Paul's preaching. The other is the imposing Heracles," a fine copy in Pentelic marble after Scopas, as Professor Gardner thinks, though others see in it the dominant influence of Lysippus. Such noble works of antiquity are rare indeed outside museums, and the export of them from Italy or the Near East is now virtually impossible, so that the Lansdowne sale may well be awaited with lively interest by the directors of the leading museums of the world.
The discerning people who regularly look in at Mr. Hurcomb's sale rooms were well rewarded last week. For the fine collec- tion of china dispersed on Friday, February 7th, 'included the famous and beautiful Chelsea group, known as " The Music Lesson." This exquisite piece, made about 1765, was adapted from Boucher's painting, " L'Agreable Lecon," which a few years earlier had been copied in a somewhat similar group by Luck, of Frankenthal. The experts, after some hesitation, now seem to think that the distinguished sculptor, L. F. Roubiliac, who was a friend of Sprimont, the director of the Chelsea factory, may have modelled the unusually graceful figures -of the shepherd and his lass, who are seated against a " bocage " of hawthorn in blossoin. The piece, which is sixteen inches high, is richly coloured and gilt, and is always regarded as one of the technical triumphs of the Chelsea works. It is also one of the rarest of Chelsea pieces—though there is a fine example in the Schreiber collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Thus there need be no surprise at the fact that this charming bit of old china fetched no less than £3,250. Some remarkable early English pottery is to be sold at the same rooms on February 26th.
E. G. H.
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