The opulent interior of 11 Wyuna Road in Sydney on March 1 and the grand views of Sydney Harbour from the house helped Paul Sumner and Jennifer Gibson sell nearly all of the lots at an on-site sale. The gross of $224,000 was the sum of many lots sold just below the lower estimates to one couple and a handful of local Chinese buyers. The lots sold totalled 267 of 290 offered.
Mossgreen, the Sumner- Charles Leski auction house which held the sale, was especially helped by accommodating vendors willing to take accept a slice off the prices charged by Paris galleries which are the prime or should it be Primo selling places for the contemporary sumptuous décor of gilt wood and rich carving which radiated in the apartment.
Often such sacrifices are made because the vendors are under pressure staring at the d for debt problem. That is one of the auctioneers three lucky sales helpers: debt, divorce of debt. This was certainly not the case in this instance as the couple selling the contents recently clinched a deal to sell their small goods empire to a Brazilian company for $300 million. Sumner agreed that their identity might be out there for those who looked (indeed he would not provide any clues!) but the last thing wanted at this type of genuine fast clearance sale was a lot of ice-cream suckers.
The contents could also easily have been shipped off to Dubai where they would have looked stunning in one of the high rise apartments with even more spectacular views.
One of the lots had been purchased for more than $400,000 and given that the highest price in the sale was $14,640, the vendors had obviously agreed to cut the fat. The price was for a massive (253 cm high and 470 cm wide) Louis XV style gilt bronze mounted marquetry inlaid display cabinet, and the sale price compared with estimates of $15,000 to $25,000 but to great relief as the apartment had to be vacated and this was not the kind of piece that could be left behind.
A Royal Worcester covered urn circa 1903 painted with flowers and richly gilded made $8540 ($3000 to $5000) and a set of eight Louis XVI style dining chairs went to $5857 ($2500 to $4000).
Another high score thanks to the low price goal (the vending household also owns a football club) was $5368 (estimate $2000 to $3000) for the piece de resistance, an unusual contemporary glass top dining table with figural bird supports (pictured with the chairs).
The symmetry of this astonishing piece of design was arguably upset by the need to present the two supporting birds flying in the same direction. Otherwise flying in the opposite directions they would appear to be crashing into each other like two Western Sydney Wanderers football players. But the best view was still through the window.
More original traditional antique taste was reflected in the offering of Jewels and Objects d'art auction including the collection of the late George Wilcox by Leonard Joel at the revamped InterContinental in Double Bay on March 8. The market for antiques has shrunk in recent years and the sale missed out on the swag of dealers that once occupied shops in Queen Street that might have hovered around this offering.
The hotel is not far from where the late Peter Cook (Grafton Galleries) and the late Alfred Buxton used to ply their trade. Even the London trade has diminished but the attraction was the rarity of the offering of a collection with a few quality items put together more than 30 years ago.
In Leonard Joel's Sydney's rather dark and claustrophobic rooms it was hard to display to advantage but it was this very type of setting that 18th century antiques and earlier had to serve – a dark look that lost out so heavily to open plan modern apartments in the minimalist revolution in taste at the end of the last millennium. Wilcox was cluey on long case and mantel clocks which he went to London to buy and secured from metropolitan and regional dealers. Robert Williams, Leonard Joel's Sydney representative, said the company was very pleased with the result for this (now a little out of vogue) offering.
The sale was about 90 per cent sold grossing $486,871 IBP compared with $520,000 for Leonard Joel's Sydney sale last year and $637,000 for the sale before that.
As Joel's is going head to head over single owner sales with Mossgreen it was especially pleased to have secured the sale. Martyn Cook, who is Mossgreen's associate antiques specialist in Sydney, said he was not unduly disappointed to miss out.
Pride of the collection estimated at $20,000-$30,000 was a fine Regency musical automata clock by James Smith which went to an oversees buyer against bids from Australia, London, and China for $41,480 IBP. The 350 lot offering sold to a crowd of up to 80 with the lesser jewellery lots at the end slowing the sale down and putting a bit of a damper on the offering.
Joel's subscribes to the increasingly popular notion that auctions are events at which you win things (does the InterContinental have a gaming licence?) with its Internet price list referring to successful bids as winning bids.
But there were no winners like the vendor of a piece of Chelsea porcelain, which, at another sale, held by Peter Wilson of Nantwich in the UK, certainly scored when a rather battered beaker, a rare piece of Chelsea underglaze blue estimated at £100 to £200, sold for £37,000 recently.
Details of the “sleeper” are given in the latest issue of the Antiques Trade Gazette. It had once belonged to the Australian collector Nigel Morgan.
Mossgreen, courtesy of its takeover of Gary's Watson's Prestige Philatelic business last Thursday and Friday turned over $1.2 million worth of philatelic items from various collections and named collectors. Lest fellow auctioneers are still pondering the rationale of the merger that created the group, Mossgreen has signed up the remainder of natural health products distributor Arthur Grey's George V material. The first part of the collection, kangaroo issues, was sold in 2007 by Shreves in New York for $7.1 million. Three sales beginning in October will now disperse around $5 million worth. This suggests a bending of the cultural cringe to sell in London where there is also a good market in Australian stamps.
Philatelic sales have also turned up material with interest to Australiana buffs. Why even Anne McCormick of Sydney's Hordern House, a rare book dealer has been spotted at one such sale when a cache of convict envelopes, some with a letter in them, turned up.
She was not spotted in Armadale last week, however, but the sales included more of these which suggests this is where such old envelopes with letters either in them or formed as letters, can still be found. An 1843 letter to Berkshire from “Port Macquarie near Sydney” sold for $5850 against an estimate of $3000 with the Port Macquarie mark unusually boldly struck, and an 1856 letter from Launceston to London similarly estimated making $7020.
A rather more interesting lot with some of the details of the contents in the catalogue failed to sell at an estimate of $400. It described a glut of unsaleable goods, designed by a government aiming to “retard the colony.” The letters were from a collection of consigned by a Melbourne real estate investor with the very early colonial name of Michael Lewin.
For a city where five general auction sales can be held simultaneously the results were surprising, especially as people throw out soiled old envelopes, brown furniture is passe and modern Louis is – well – surreal.
