The exuberant recollections of long retired Sydney decorator Lex Aitkin about high society are being giving some credence by early reports of the contents of the container that has arrived in London from Sydney.
The contents will form the nucleus of a sale at Christie's South Kensington on June 4.
There are no mementos of Claudette Colbert in the sale but it is certainly of a refined Hollywood class. Colbert was a French-born American actress who was a leading lady for two decades.
Melbourne-born Aitken often taxed those he met in later life in Sydney with stories of the London society he frequented in the 1970s in his early days as a dealer and decorator on the Pimlico Road. For a while the central figures in his circle as he would have it, were Colbert and Lucien Freud.
Anyone who met him away from the Watson Bay home he shared with his life partner the Mexican Alfredo Bouret Gonzalez might have been forgiven for thinking he inhabited a different world.
The quieter Gonzalez had brought even more colour to this very real London world with his establishment Mexicana, a business which imported peasant shirts and sold them to the likes of Princess Diana and Valentino.
Before his tragic death last year in a fall from an apartment in the Bellevue Hill retirement apartment to which they had moved Aitken and Gonzales spoke to Ronan Sulich and Deutscher and Hackett about the dispersal of the collection and indicated that they would like the “Old Masters” and decorative art in the collection to be sold in London.
The Australian paintings and a group of paintings by the modern British artist Bridget Riley were sold by D + H last August. Most of the Rileys went to overseas buyers for record prices. The final London consignments show the other side of their collecting. Their business was a major port of call with Australians as well as celebrity clientele until the duo moved Down Under.
It appears there was not enough in the container to support a stand-alone sale but it is being seeded with 60 lots from Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler, Brook Street, Mayfair suppliers to the decarts trade, in a bid to appeal to first time collectors and aficionados of design. The Art of Design, the Lex Aitken and Alfredo Gonzalez Collection and Sybil and John Fowler...at Christie's is being promoted as a new concept in sales which will include furniture, ceramics, pictures, lighting and decorative objects with estimates from £300 to £3000.
Knowing what to do with it was part of the reason for the delay in its offering as well as were delays in securing certificates for furniture containing ivory, a highly regulated trade. The collection from Sydney has only a couple of “highly priced” items even in the South Kensington branch's lowly terms. It is expected to gross around £500,000.
The sale is led by two fine portraits, one, by Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942) a full length oil titled Young woman at a Window, at £25,000 to £25,000 and the other by George Romney (1734-1802) Mrs Moody Three Quarter length in a white dress holding a dog in her lap, with an estimate of £50,000 to £80,000.
Other lots include a parcel gilt 10 branch chandelier, an English cream-painted 19th century display cabinet a George III gilt wood mirror, a panoramic view of Lahore and a Victorian post box. The offering would have made a neat boutique one-owner sale in Sydney or Melbourne although buyers may not have known who the collectors were even in the wake of the Riley sales. They had faded from view in their maturity.
Yet there must have been some hope that members of the circle the couple moved in would have surfaced for the sale even 50 years after the business flourished. London sadly for Lex seems to have been a nostalgia based indulgence.
Last July Christie's and Colefax-Fowler had what it describes as a very successful collaboration. John Fowler produced distinctive decoration of the Audience Room at Buckingham Palace, and his influence on the interiors of regal residences throughout the United Kingdom
After Lex died Alfredo, distraught and in his late 80s, left to live with his family in Vancouver. He also reminiscenced about meeting Christian Dior on leaving Mexico for Paris in 1948 and put a lot of work into the collection..
Eight of the fashion designer's pen and ink sketches from circa 1950 are in the sale with an estimate of £1500 to £2300.
The serious nature of the collection and business was underlined by the 13 chests of antiques and arts reference books that were sent from it to Sydney auctioneer John Williams for sale also late last year.
