Letter from London

by Ian McKay, e-mail: <ianmckay1@btinternet.com>

Scotland's Gift—The Goff

A memento of Queen Victoria's beloved Highlander, John Brown; a rare silver snuff mull presented by a Scottish Duke; and a battered old Bible thought to have been used by Robert Burns during his dying days were among the more sought after lots when Bonhams held their tenth annual Scottish sale in Edinburgh, August 18-21. These are illustrated and further described in accompanying caption stories, but the most successful of all the lots on offer was a reminder that Scotland is the traditional home of what is today one of the world's most popular sports and pastimes, the game that one American writer on the game described as "Scotland's Gift."

The first separately printed book devoted entirely to the game of golf is Thomas Mathison's The Goff. An Heroi-Comical Poem. First published in 1743 in Edinburgh, it was posthumously reissued there on two more occasions, 1763 and 1793, before the century's end. What makes it even more startling as the first flickering flame of a tradition of golf literature is that it was not until 1824 that another work entirely devoted to golf, The Rules of the Thistle Golf Club, was published.

In 1721, James Arbuckle's poem, Glotta, had made a passing reference to the game now played by millions across the world, but it was Mathison, an Edinburgh born and trained legal writer, or lawyer's clerk, who produced the golfing classic that the great golf book collector Joseph Murdoch memorably described as, "standing alone in a century of silence."

The Goff satirises in 358 lines of verse, and in mock heroic vein, a game played on Leith Links, near Edinburgh, and while it is first and foremost a poetical exercise, it provides a great deal of information on the way the game was played at the time and the equipment used. The poem makes reference to the leading players of the day, the "Caledonian Chiefs," who were drawn from the professional elite of Edinburgh and were founder members of the first golf club, The Company of Gentlemen Golfers. The principal protagonists are Pygmalion (the author) and Castillo, who was later to be identified as Alexander Dunning, an Edinburgh bookseller and possibly Mathison's brother-in-law.

All three 18th-century editions are of the greatest rarity, but the 1793 third edition offered as part of the Bonhams sale was not the first to have come onto the open market this year.

In February of this year, PBA Galleries of San Francisco put up for sale a copy of the 1763 second edition. The introduction to a 1981 facsimile of all three editions suggests that this edition may actually be the rarest of the group, with only five copies recorded. Three of those are already in institutional collections—in the British Library, the Professional Golfers Association of America library, and the United States Golf Association library-and of the two remaining in private hands, one may itself already be destined for an institutional library.

With this in mind PBA pointed out that what they were offering, a copy removed from an old binding and now preserved in a custom-made folding calf box, might well be the first and last chance to acquire a copy of this edition—indeed an exceptionally rare opportunity to acquire any of those 18th-century editions. They valued this copy of a poem that once sold for just a few cents at a very bullish $150,000/200,000.

Joseph Murdoch's copy of the 1793 edition, in a 19th-century cloth binding, had made $80,500 when PBA sold that great library back in 1998. There was quite a bit of presale interest in the California copy of The Goff, but even the scarcer golf books are not the bankers they once were, and no one was prepared go as high as the reserve price of $130,000.

The copy offered in Edinburgh, in cloth-backed boards, was also marked second edition on the title page but bears the 1793 Edinburgh imprint of Peter Hill (who, by the by, was a member of the Edinburgh Burgess Golfing Society) and is in fact a copy of a third edition. Dedicated "To all the lovers of Goff, in Europe, Asia, Africa and America," this edition also has an appendix containing two other poems in praise of Goff and an addendum in which the names of "the most celebrated golfers left blank in the first [and second] edition" are supplied.

This one was more successful than the PBA second edition and found a new home at $42,310. For the only copy of the 1743 first edition to have come to auction—at least in recent decades—one has to go back to 1986, when a copy in a later Zaehnsdorf binding made £18,700 (then around $25,000) in a sale held by one of the pioneers of golfing sales, Phillips of Chester in England.

Many will be familiar with the story of the friendship—and some would suggest more than simple friendship—that developed between Queen Victoria and the Scottish gillie, John Brown, either from the many books that this intriguing story generated or more likely from the 1997 film starring Billy Connolly as John Brown and Judi Dench as Queen Victoria, or the Mrs. Brown of the film title that recalled jibes made at the time. Following John Brown's death in 1883, we are told in Lytton Strachey's 1921 biography of Victoria, a gold memorial brooch or pin was designed, apparently by the sovereign herself, for presentation to her Highland servants and the occupants of the cottages on her Scottish estate. Showing John Brown's profile portrait, flanked by the initials "JB," on the one side and the royal monogram on the other, the brooches or pins were intended to be worn on the successive anniversaries of his death, along with a mourning scarf. An example of these stickpins was sold in the Bonhams Scottish sale for a ten times estimate $9445.

Supper Is Served

A sort of forerunner of the hostess trolley, I suppose, but without the heating element, this late 18th-century mahogany supper table is unusual in having retained the wire grilles of the lower section—a feature often missing from such pieces. The top, if not the pair of drop-leaves, would appear to have seen hard usage, but in a June 30 "Interiors" sale held at Christie's South Kensington it was bid to $7293.

It was one of a small group of items that came to auction from Shirburn Castle, a romantic moated castle in Oxfordshire belonging to the Earls of Macclesfield and the home of one of the greatest private libraries ever sold at auction. Christie's may have got some odd bits of furniture, but it is Sotheby's who from March 2004 to October 2008 held 12 sales to disperse the great library and raised tens of millions of dollars in the process.

Bookstands and the Bard

I have a couple of these little bookstands in my bedroom, one perched on a large Edwardian chest of drawers, the other on a low coffer beside the bed that holds the books more immediately in line on my reading list. For some reason I have always been inordinately fond of my telescopic bookstands, though mine are nowhere near as smart as this one. There is something curiously (or perhaps worryingly?) satisfying about the simple but effective sliding mechanism that means they will neatly hold just as many books as I want, but will always make room for just one more!

This Victorian walnut, gilt-metal, and Sèvres style porcelain-mounted example was sold for $590 in a Bonhams sale of August 4.

Peter Schee-makers (1691-1781), a Flemish-born sculptor who studied in Rome but in 1716 settled in London and spent the rest of his working life there, is probably best known for the statue of William Shakespeare that he produced to design by the architect William Kent for Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

That sculpture, erected in 1740, was for a time to be found on British £20 banknotes, but here we see a plaster and composition stone version on a composition base that came up for sale at Bonhams on August 4. On a wooden plinth (not shown here) the work is well over 8' tall. The base is inscribed "P. Scheemakers 1, MDCCXL," but this version possibly dates from the late 19th century. It sold for $17,710.

A Kilkenny Cistern

A July 8 Christie's South Kensington sale that included a selection of stock and personal pieces entered for sale by four well-known English dealers was called "An English Look," but not everything it contained was of English origin, and the cistern seen here is almost certainly of Irish manufacture.

A shale cistern or wine cooler of 28" diameter that was once part of the ornament found in a Dublin garden, it dates to the first part of the 18th century and is believed to be a product of the marble works founded in Kilkenny in the 1730's by William Colles.

The Colles workshops turned out table tops, chimneypieces, and cisterns throughout the 18th century, and a very similar piece was sold at King Street for $47,837 in September 2000—as part of the sale of contents from The Manor House, the Clifton Hampden home of the dealer Christopher Gibbs. This one at Christie's South Kensington was bid to $69,676.

Summer Is Icumen In…

Well, to be truthful, summer may actually be packing its bags and getting ready to leave by the time you read this piece, but it was the title of that famous but anonymous medieval song that Herbert Arnould Olivier chose for a 1902 oil of a young woman in diaphanous ivory and coral gown that sold for a much higher than expected $542,455 to London dealers Richard Green at Sotheby's on July 15. It is also the title that serves well for this piece on two summery pictures.

Standing near the banks of a small stream beneath the blossom-laden branches of an apple tree, with snake's-head fritillary, primroses, cowslips, and cow parsley carpeting the ground beneath her feet on a perfect late spring day, the young woman in Olivier's picture may symbolise not just the promise of summer to come, but be a reference as well to Persephone, a Greek goddess associated with the rebirth that spring brings. The picture was produced at the dawn of a new century, and the story of Persephone's return from the Underworld to rejoin her mother, Demeter, had a particular appeal at this auspicious time.

Herbert Arnould Olivier (1861-1952), who once had quite a reputation as a painter of portraits, picturesque landscapes, and large allegorical works, was the son of a Sussex vicar and an uncle of the actor, Sir Laurence Olivier. The picture came to auction from a member of the Olivier family.

My other summery selection, showing two girls sitting on a cliff edge beneath a cloud dappled sky, is a 38" x 44" watercolour and bodycolour work called Wind and Sun by Dame Laura Knight.

Laura and her painter husband, Harold, had moved to Cornwall in 1907, and the ten years they spent there she later described as "the time the very bright of life beamed on us." The brilliant sunlight and the natural beauty of the local coastline, along with the camaraderie of the Newlyn colony of artists, invigorated them both, and all sorts of ambitious projects were planned.

Around 1911, Laura began work on a large picture to be called Daughters of the Sun, but for this she wanted two girls to pose nude by the sea, and the local lovelies were not going to take their clothes off, even for a lady artist. Instead, she was forced to send to London for three professional models, one of whom was a leggy ex-dancer called Dolly who later married her husband's brother, Edgar.

Laura made full use of her models during their stay in Cornwall, amassing dozens of figure drawings before the girls caught the train from Penzance back to London. These she intended to use as studies not just for Daughters of the Sun, but for many other pictures as well.

Though critically acclaimed when first exhibited in 1912, Daughters of the Sun did not sell and became so damaged in its various exhibitions around the country that she eventually decided to cut it up and sell the fragments individually. Nevertheless, over the years she produced a series of bright and colourful paintings of figures, nude and clothed, on beach or cliff-top, and Wind and Sun, painted in the same year as Daughters of the Sun, is one of her best.

Painted from the footpath on Tregurnow Cliff, above Lamorna Cove—where once an unsuspecting wanderer may have stumbled blushingly on Dolly and her chums posing au naturel—this is a wonderful evocation of summer breezes and companionship that in a Sotheby's sale of July 15 went to an anonymous bidder at $1,498,158.

Hocus Pocus! A Rarity Revealed!

Hocus Pocus Junior: The Anatomie of Legerde-main…, first printed in 1634, was the first illustrated book in the English language devoted entirely to the subject of magic and conjuring. Not only that, but around 30 woodcuts were used to illustrate the featured tricks-among them the famous "Cups and Balls" trick seen in the frontispiece shown here.

Thirteen editions of Hocus Pocus Junior were listed by Raymond Toole Stott in the standard reference for this type of material, his 1976 A Bibliography of English Conjuring 1581-1876, and a copy, bound up with 19 other tracts and pamphlets, that came up for sale at Sotheby's on July 14 was an example of the fourth edition of 1654. To give some idea of how rare a find this was, I should point out that all 17th-century editions are of extreme rarity, and in the last 30 years, only two other early copies of the work have been seen (or at least, offered separately) at auction. What is more, those were copies of the 13th and 15th editions of 1697 and circa 1715.

Searching on line for some additional background, I found that in the November 2002 issue of The Magic Circular, a publication of the Magic Circle of London, Dr. Philip Butterworth, Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds, had suggested that a certain William Vincent could be the author of this famous but traditionally anonymous work.

Butterworth noted that in 1619, this William Vincent was granted a licence "to exercise the art of Legerdemaine in any Townes within the Relme of England and Ireland" and was described at the time as "alias Hocus Pocus, of London." Vincent also seems at some point in his career to have been accused of cheating at the game of "ticke tacke."

References to Vincent in the years 1634-42 indicate that his talents may have included rope dancing, and he was also a sword swallower, "…vomiting up daggers, like Hocus, to amaze the people." There is also a record of his being paid to stay away from the city of Gloucester, but this was no reflection on the quality of his act-merely a precaution against spreading contagion at a time of plague!

An epitaph to Vincent appeared in 1667, but the name "Hocus Pocus" continued to appear in magic literature for many years, especially in book titles.

A comment on Genii, a U.S.-based on-line magazine for conjurors, speculated that the volume was bought at $61,090 by "one of us," but Sotheby's tells me only that it went to a private buyer. Whoever it may have been, Hocus Pocus Junior was not the only thing this lucky buyer got. It was undoubtedly the reason for the high bid, but also included among the 20 tracts bound together in this volume were such things as:

o A 1659 edition of Walk knaves walk by Edmund Gayton, a work that includes a diversion on the poor quality of flimsy footwear manufactured in Essex!

o Henry Neville's A New and further Discovery of the Islle of Pines of 1668, a continuation of a much reprinted and translated libertine fantasy in which George Pine is shipwrecked with four women on a fertile island that is soon copiously populated by their offspring.

o Learne to lye warm…reasons wherefore a young man should marry an old woman by A.B. (1672).

Mr. Byng Loved His Boulle

Certainly one of the more spectacular furniture lots seen in London so far this year was this pair of Louis XIV period ormolu-mounted Boulle marquetry coffres en tombeaux, or coffers-on-stands.

Made by the man who gave his name to this decorative style, André-Charles Boulle, these are almost certainly the coffers that he delivered in 1688 to Henri-Jules de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, who gave them to his daughter as a wedding present. The pieces were twice sold at auction in the latter part of the 18th century, but in 1816 or 1817 were acquired by a wealthy Englishman, George Byng.

It was in 1789, the year that saw the French Revolution, that Byng inherited the great Palladian mansion of Wrotham Park and determined to improve and embellish his inheritance through the acquisition of more fine furnishings and works of art. Byng was especially attracted to works with a distinguished provenance-the items he acquired at the 1819 Christie's sale of Queen Charlotte's collection, for example—and, in common with other major collectors of the Regency period, was drawn to French decorative arts.

Between 1816 and 1823, following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and restrictions on travel to France, he made at least four visits to Paris, and it was from the premises of one of the major dealers catering to the enthusiastic and wealthy British buyers—Madame Daval, on the Quai Malaquais, at the corner of the rue Bonaparte—that he acquired these coffres en tombeaux.

A manuscript inventory that Byng compiled shortly before his death tells us that he had paid 8000 livres for them, which at the time was £329 in his own currency. At today's exchange rates that works out at $540, but at Christie's on July 9, these Boulle masterworks, having finally left Wrotham Park after a stay of almost 200 years, were acquired at $4,211,155 by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Another of Byng's Boulle acquisitions, a table en bureau dating to circa 1720, was sold for $2.54 million at Christie's New York back in November 2000, but yet another piece from Wrotham Park in this summer's King Street sale, a Boulle cabinet-on-stand of circa 1680, failed to sell—perhaps because some late 18th-century alterations were not to everyone's liking.

More "Remains" from Powderham Castle

The rare copy of Hocus Pocus Junior featured in this month's reports emerged from the library at Powderham Castle, the ancestral home of the Earls of Devon, and on September 29, some 130 lots of furnishings, works of art, paintings, etc. from that ancient pile will be sold at Sotheby's.

Built between 1390 and 1420 by Sir Philip Courtenay, Powderham remains in the hands of his descendants to this day, but despite the castle's great age, the works coming up for auction are in large part related to the remodeling of the interiors undertaken in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by the architect James Wyatt.

Proceeds from the sale will go towards the upkeep of Powderham Castle, which this year celebrates 50 years of welcoming the public, but even those of you whose numbers were not to be found among the million or more visitors that the castle has received over the years may have unwittingly seen some of the private rooms from which the objects being sold at Sotheby's are drawn.

Many events have been held in the castle and on grounds over the last half century, but anyone who has a recording of the 1993 film version of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Remains of the Day (starring Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Hugh Grant, and Christopher Reeve) will have seen some of the private rooms of Powderham Castle.

An exterior view, along with one of the rooms, is shown here, along with the most important picture in the sale, a Reynolds family portrait valued at $300,000 or more.

Big Cat, Little Cats

The Victorians and Edwardians loved to scatter such things on the cold flagstones of their halls and dens, and there was a time when aspiring young starlets might be photographed sprawled across one, but nowadays one is mildly surprised to see a tiger skin illustrated at all in a sales catalogue. Taxidermy is a touchy subject, especially where big cats are concerned, but this Indian tiger skin was prepared in the days before most of us realised that we were in danger of ridding the planet of this magnificent creature. Nearly 9' feet long overall, this skin was mounted onto a cloth and velvet backing by Van Ingen & Van Ingen of Mysore in the 1920's or '30's, and in a Christie's South Kensington "Interiors" sale of July 21 it was bid to $15,441.

The ink and watercolour illustration is one of a group of 16 original artworks on the subject of cats by Ronald Searle seen in the salesroom's "Interiors" sale on July 28 of the following week. They were all made, I think, for a 1970's collection of his drawings on cats, and this one, signed to lower right, is inscribed "Young cat already regretting puberty." It made $4962.

Miniature Cabinet Goes Back to Tredegar House

It has emerged that the miniature cabinet featured in last month's column is to be returned to the grand home for which it was commissioned in the early 18th century, Tredegar House. It had been there right up until 1951, when the Morgan family left their ancestral home, and was initially sold off at Christie's six years later. This summer it returned to London to sell for $112,750 in a Bonhams sale of June 24.

It has since been revealed that the dealer who made the winning bid was acting for a consortium determined to return the piece to its former home. When the family left in the 1950's, Tredegar House was used for many years as a school, but in 1974 it passed into the care of Newport City Council, who now manage the house and gardens as a tourist attraction and as a conference centre and wedding venue.

Emily Price, curator at Tredegar House, who is always looking to return pieces to their original home, said: "We were extremely excited when we saw that this pretty cabinet was coming up for auction, and knew that we had to try to raise the money to bring it back to Tredegar House permanently. Such distinctive and attractive pieces of furniture from the house's original collection do not come onto the market very often, so last month's auction was a rare opportunity to enrich our displays. The new acquisition will help us to give visitors a taste of how opulent the house was when the Morgan family lived here."

Around half the money came from a grant from the independent charity, The Art Fund, with another substantial sum supplied from the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund. Smaller contributions from the Friends of Tredegar House and the Beecroft Bequest made up the balance.

Stand Firm and Deliver the Mails

Delivering the mails in England in the late 18th or early 19th century could be a dangerous business at times. As was undoubtedly the case in other countries, there were those who saw the mail coaches as a very attractive target, and highwaymen or other dastardly fellows, their faces partly covered in a style favoured by all from Dick Turpin to Hollywood's Wild West desperadoes, would cry "stand and deliver" before robbing the coaches of the mail and their passengers of any valuables they might have about their persons.

It was a hard life, and those who operated the mail coaches could themselves stand firm in the face of such attacks and often went armed, either with pistols or, for the full impact, with a blunderbuss that scattered its shot over a far wider area.

Seen in a Bonhams arms sale of July 29 were a pair of 22-bore brass-barrelled flintlock pistols and a brass-barrelled flintlock blunderbuss that were made specially for mail coach use and engraved around their muzzles with the words "For His Majesty's Mail Coaches." The blunderbuss, made around 1810 by H.W. Mortimer & Son, a regular supplier of firearms to the law enforcement, postal, prison, and customs and excise services, was sold at $9840, and the pair of pistols, made 1815-20 by J. Harding of London, who also held the title "Gun Maker to the General Post Office," reached $6300.

Somewhat smarter weapons in this July sale came in the form of two pairs of duelling pistols. The earlier of the two was a cased pair of 34-bore flintlock pistols by John Twigg of London. These date originally from 1766-70 but are in a case bearing the label and trade cards of another London gunmaker, Alexander Wilson, who replaced one of the flat bevelled locks and may have made other alterations or repairs. Last seen at auction in October 2001, when Christie's sold them for $12,558 as part of the W. Keith Neal collection, the set this time reached $37,390.

The very last of almost 600 lots offered over a long Bonhams day was a cased pair of 40-bore flintlock duelling pistols by Thomas Manton of London. Dating from circa 1817, this pair could almost be described as salesroom regulars, having been sold at Christie's in 1981, 1983, and again in 1994. This time out at Bonhams the set reached $35,425.

A pair of flintlock pistols and a blunderbuss made specially for use on "His Majesty's Mail Coaches" in the early 19th century sold for $6300 and $9840 respectively at Bonhams.

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