Art: Leverhulme Sale

In the red auction room of the Anderson Galleries, Manhattan, the sale of Viscount Leverhulme’s furniture, his rare porcelains, his tapestries and paintings (TIME, Feb. 22), went steadily on. In the past fortnight the auctioneer has applied that word “sold” to the following objects, among others:

Porcelain. A Chinese vase in green, yellow, and aubergine (1665) to Frank Partridge of London for $3,100, the highest price paid for anything in the porcelain collection. B. N. Needham, Manhattan collector, paid $2,000 for a Chamberlain Worcester dessert service of 45 pieces. Each plate is painted with a scene from one of Shakespeare’s plays, and has on its back (in case any inquisitive guest should turn it over) an appropriate quotation from the bard.

Pictures. Gainsborough’s portrait of a young girl in a blue dress with flowers in her hands, flowers in her lap, and a face like a dim sleepy flower, was started at $1,500, raised by three bidders in fast cuts to $20,000, bought by Messrs. Scott & Fowls, dealers. Four more Gainsboroughs were sold for a total of $7,900. Governor Alvin T. Fuller of Massachusetts paid $31,000 for a picture of a girl and some red herrings by Millais.* Goya’s portrait of Pepe Illo, a bullfighter of Madrid, brought $25,000. On the third day of the sale of paintings, 91 odd canvases, and some impressive ones, were sold for a total of $110,745.

Books. Viscount Leverhulme was not much of a reader. He liked to look at books with pictures in them, the kind of pictures he saw in Punch or on theatrical handbills. He collected old mezzotints and caricatures, and would sit for hours with one of his scrapbooks in his lap, staring at the twisted faces and bright colors as if he were reading some racy tale. The people who bought his books were on the lookout for collections such as these; they, like Leverhulme, cared little for literature, and so it came about that first editions of Thackeray were knocked down for $6 or so, while Lawrence Gomme paid $3,200 for a collection of 5,000 caricatures in 24 folio volumes, including original drawings by Dowland, Cruikshank, Aiken, and Leech; M. J. Swanson paid $190 for a book on corpulency by one William Wadd, which contains an autograph of Daniel Lambert (his weight was 739 pounds); Maurice Hoog, dealer, paid $1,800 for a collection of 1,200 engraved trade-cards and billheads of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

The total of the sale at this point was $1,043,496.

*Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896), not to be confused with Millet.