As we draw to the end of another year, we look back on 2023 as a year of many highs across all our specialist departments, with outstanding single-owner sales, auction records, white glove sales and numerous rare and beautiful objects that it has been a privilege to handle for our clients. This year we have held 80 sales and sold over 36,000 lots with a total hammer price of £14.1m and an enviable 89% sold rate (all figures exclude buyer’s premium).
Jane Tennant says:
“It has been a very busy and exciting year for all of us at Tennants, culminating in a series of outstanding sales in the Autumn. It is always an honour to be entrusted to sell an entire collection or estate for a client, and we were delighted to achieve three ‘white glove’ single-owner sales in October.
The results we have achieved this year are a testament to the strength of the team at Tennants, and their breadth of knowledge, which allows us to execute such a diversity of sales to such effect. As we continue to invest in our specialist departments, clients have the confidence that we will achieve the best results on their behalf irrespective of the discipline”.
The six single-owner sales this year, which realised a total hammer price of just under £1m for 1404 lots, were led by the sale in January of the David Stather Library, put together over a lifetime by an avid bibliophile. The collection reflected his overriding interests in history and the law; the quality and rarity of the volumes in the library was reflected in exceptionally high prices across the sale and a 99% sold rate. Following on were two single-owner picture sales, the T.B. & R. Jordan Collection of Staithes Artists, and the Raymond Booth Studio Sale (100% sold rate), and the mixed discipline Harlequin and Austria sales which drew in an extraordinary number of bidders, and both achieved a 100% sold rate. The year of single-owner sales was closed with the specialist coin sale of A Private Collection of a Yorkshire Numismatist.
It has been a strong year over all for Private Collections of all sizes, which were included across the entire roster of sales. Highlights that stand out include The Brian Elliott Collection of Scratch Built Live Steam Fine Scale Models, which attracted steam enthusiasts from across the country when it sold in the Transport Sale for a total hammer price of £102,000. Many of the models on offer in the sale were beautifully rendered copies of real locomotive engines and traction engines, and leading the collection was a very well-engineered 10 ¼“ Gauge 0-4-2T Collett Class 14xx Locomotive finished in Green as Great Western Railway 1400, which sold for £18,000. A Private Collection of Asian Art from the north of England included a pair of fine Chinese Porcelain Yellow Ground Medallion Bowls, which sold for £90,000 in the Autumn Fine Sale having attracted fierce international bidding. Bearing the Daoguang mark and made in the second quarter of the 19th century, the finely made bowls were painted in enamels with scenes of a goat, a sheep, and a ram. From the same collection came an early 19th century Chinese Porcelain Table Screen, painted in famille rose enamels with figures in a fenced garden, which smashed the £700-1,000 estimate to sell for £38,000. A Private Collection of Paintings from a Yorkshire Estate led the British, European and Sporting Art Sale in March, realising a combined hammer price of £176,550 for the 23 lots. The collection came from Denton Hall, Ilkley, West Yorkshire, and topping the paintings was “Cowslips” by George Dunlop Leslie (1835-1921), which sold for £91,000.
Modern and Contemporary Art has gone from strength to strength in a year marked for the sale of ten works by the great L.S. Lowry, which included two works produced in collaboration with fellow northern artist Harold Riley. Following on from last year’s sale of Lowry’s The North Sea for £840,000, the ten works achieved a total hammer price of £417,000 and were led by his ‘Street Scene with Figures’, which sold for £110,000 and was the earliest work so far to appear on the market from a rare group of joyful and vibrant figurative pastel works by Lowry executed between 1947 and 1950. Only two other notable works from the series that have previously come to market.
The year has been notable, too, for very strong results from the thriving Jewellery, Watches and Silver Sales. The six specialist sales spread throughout the year amassed a total hammer price of £2.6m. Heading the sales was a gold crossover ring realistically modelled as a two-headed snake set with diamonds in their heads, which sold for sold for £130,000. The incised scales and modelling to the faces were fine and naturalistic, but it was the rare pear cut fancy greyish blue diamond set in the head of one of the snakes that excited bidders. Rare period jewellery was much in demand too, and a Chalcedony, Sapphire and Diamond Flower Brooch by Suzanne Belperron, one of the most original and influential jewellery designers of the 20th century, sold for £38,000; the brooch was the Property of a Lady, who was given it on her wedding day in 1952 by the Italian noblewoman Marchesa Maria Nunziate di Mignano. Notable lots amongst the silver included a charming Fabergé silver table lighter in the form of an Indian elephant, which sold for £21,000, and in amongst the watches a rare 1976 18 Carat Gold Cartier ‘Tank Normal’ Wristwatch, which sold for £21,000.
Our specialist collector’s sales have continued to produce some of the outstanding lots of the year, topped by the Natural History and Taxidermy Sale in September in which a very rare Victorian cased pair of extinct New Zealand Huia sold for £220,000, which is thought to be a world auction record for a single piece of taxidermy. From the Books, Maps and Manuscripts Department notable highlights included a group our forty-one Civil War Pamphlets, which sold for £16,000, and a copy of ornithologist John Gould's A Monograph of the Trogonidae, or Family of Trogons sold for £15,000. A fine and rare coin-operated carousel musical automaton, almost certainly made in Switzerland circa 1895 by Bornand Frères, sold for £13,000 in the February Scientific and Musical Instruments Sale.
