Sale-rooms
The secret of Annie's gun
Alistair McAlpine
n 1887 Buffalo Bill's Wild West show came to London. The cast appeared along with their herd of buffalo as part of the American exhibition at Earls Court. Annie Oakley, one of the show's stars, captured the imagination of the British public. The show thrilled commoner and royalty alike. The Prince of Wales was so taken with it, and I suppose with the rather attractive Annie Oakley, that he recommended his mother, Queen Victoria, to command a performance as part of her Silver Jubilee celebration. Annie Oakley was a star.
This was obvious from the moment this slim and attractive girl rode into the stadi- um and began to blast to splinters small round bottles, the size of a plum, filled with coloured powders that were thrown into the air. This would have been quite a trick if performed with a shotgun, but with a rifle it was almost miraculous: dollar coins were also used as targets and she seldom missed — soon she was known as Little Sure Shot.
Christie's are selling her rifle on 24 March in their sale of fine modern sporting guns and vintage firearms. This rifle looks for all the world like a normal 44-40 calibre Winchester, but it may hold the secret of her deadly accuracy for the rifling has been drilled from its barrel and it is fitted with five cartridges filled with very fine shot rather than bullets. It is a shotgun in dis- guise. The gun is expected to fetch £25,000. The Gene Autrey Museum in Los Angeles has other guns belonging to Annie Oakley, including a pair of gold-plated Smith and Westons and a very fine 20 bore sidelock shotgun by a leading London gunsmith. Annie Oakley regularly shot cigarettes from the mouth of her husband, and occa- sionally from the mouths of German princes, so even with a little help from Lot 129 she must have been quite a remarkable markswoman.
Bonhams are selling contemporary ceramics on 25 March, as they do from time to time. Paul Whitfield, one of their managing directors, has long shown an interest in this field. Their catalogues of these sales over the years have become important works of reference. This sale contains an elegant tall vase by Bernard Leach (Lot 32, estimate £3,500) and two short, fat ones to go with it (Lots 33 and 36, estimated at £2,500 and £3,500 respec- tively). Lot 170 is a `superb pink porcelain conical bowl by Dame Lucie Rie'. Its esti- mate is £5,000 and in my view it is worth a good deal more. I hate the use of the word `superb' — it is the worst of sale-room lan- guage and does little to express the beauty of this wonderful bowl.
There are a number of works in this sale by Dame Lucie. However, in the world of contemporary ceramics it is Hans Coper (1920-1981) who makes the really big money: Lot 173, 'a powerful composite stonewall vase', is estimated at £16,000. I am not greatly taken with the word `power- ful' either. There is no doubt that Lot 173 , is strong, but then so is all Hans Coper's \ work, whereas Dame Lucie's work is gen- tle. Three other lots by Hans Coper catch the eye: Lot 175, 'a large Bellform' (esti- mate £14,000); Lot 177, 'a superlative black Cycladic pot' (estimate £30,000). Oh dear, here we go again: 'superlative' — there must surely be better superlatives than that to use when describing the beauty of Mr Coper's pots. And finally, Lot 180, `a mon- umental ovoid stone-base pot' (estimate £40,000). Monumental, perhaps; a master- piece certainly. Bonhams have also, as is their way, included in this sale many works by artists less well-known than Rie and Coper, and consequently likely to fetch far smaller sums of money. This is a sale where the real bargains will go to the bidder with the most exacting eye.
In July Sotheby's are selling the title deeds recording a transaction which must surely rank alongside some of the great property deals of the world such as the sale of Alaska, Florida and Manhattan. This deal involved the purchase of half of New Zealand from a number of Maori chief- tains for the sums of between £20 and £100 each, plus annuities of between £10 and £50. There were eight chieftains involved and the man who bought their land was William Charles Wentworth.
One of the first in what has become a long tradition of Antipodean property speculators, the chiefs also threw into the deal for good measure an assortment of islands and reefs around the shores of their country. Wentworth, a lawyer, then went on to give the Maori people of New Zealand the extremely bad advice that it would be greatly to their advantage if they signed the Treaty of Waitangi, thus ceding their country to Queen Victoria.
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