Category Archives: News

General contents the invisible problem?

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Every week we see record prices being achieved by some of the greatest artworks known to man, with some of the most glamorous jewellery and watches going to auction at incredible sums, but how often do you talk with your clients about the carpet in the drawing room, or the suite of furniture purchased in the 1990s?

Just this week we have heard more news about inflation and cost of living rising again, and potentially this could increase well into 2023 and beyond.

So how does this effect your mid – high net worth clients and their contents?

The value of items within the ‘General Contents’ section of most customers insurance schedule has been rising for many years, even before COVID–19 and the dreaded lockdowns of 2020.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the values that we are seeing are increasing year on year for general home furniture by around 16% per year so a settee purchased for £10,000 this time last year would now be costing £11,600, with garden furniture increasing by up to 25% per year. So why is this?

The cost of manufacturing has sky-rocketed since 2019, with many companies having issues recruiting staff and/or sourcing materials, in turn the supply chain has suffered with transport issues in abundance – it’s not unusual to see waiting times run in to months for some items.

Two of the items that I am constantly surprised by are curtains and carpets, with some of our clients spending six figure sums on carpeting their homes, and a pair of lavishly lined silk curtains for a 13ft high sash window costing nearly £10,000, however on paper these have only increased by around 5% this year – but, this is only for the material and not the fitters or the makers, so in turn I believe that these figures are increasing by around 24% with that same pair of curtains now costing £12,400.

Whilst statistics are not available for the inflation of electrical goods, this market is different as the advancement in technology means that many items are out of date the minute they are released, there has of course though been a general increase across the board in most items of this nature.

Clothing will continue to be an interesting question with a broad figure of 8.5% inflation across the board, this however will absorb the designer and couture elements alongside the high street fashion world, which does not always give a totally accurate reflection of the mid-high net worth spending habits.

Whilst each manufacturer is different and sometimes these inflation costs will be absorbed into the operating profit of the company, in most instances, and especially in High Net Worth accounts, it is passed on to the client.

When taking an overall look at your clients, by all means be sure to look at the fine art, the jewellery and many other of the ‘visible’ items that clearly will have changed in value, but be sure that you don’t ignore the invisible ones that may well mean your client is underinsured.

Walk-through Valuation – SPECIAL OFFER

The Walk Through Valuation is a beneficial offering for you or your clients if current content values are based on a ‘guestimate’ or a ‘rough idea’ to ensure the values provided are accurate and up to date. For the comfort and security and assurance that in the event of any claim you are covered why wouldn’t you?

You don’t want to find a claim is not paid in the event of a loss, so ensuring your insurer has a true reflection of your values is so important. The Walk Through Valuation is designed for the Mid Net Worth client to establish/categories the contents correctly, on a room by room, category by category basis, itemising items of single value, identifying issues and providing cross room photographs. We don’t value the jewellery but we will discuss/establish if the current cover is adequate and any other areas of concern which would require a specialist visit.

A Senior valuer will attend the property to complete and the survey takes approximately 3 hours to complete. Our report will be issued within 15-20 working days providing recommended figures and illustrated.

So, to ensure you/your clients values are true and accurate, recommend the need for a Walk Through Appraisal today – up to 4 bedrooms – £540 plus VAT@ 20% including travel.

Call us today on 01883 722736 to book an appointment or email [email protected]

The Paul Allen collection

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In the same way that ‘location, location, location’ has historically underpinned great property investment, ‘quality, quality, quality’ has always lain at the heart of great art collecting. The strength of this strategy of only buying the very best proven crystal clear with the spectacular results achieved by the recent auction of the art collection amassed by the late Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen’s at Christie’s.

Split in two parts – Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Art Collection, was provocatively billed by Christie’s in their pre-sale marketing, ‘to be the largest and most exceptional art auction in history’, with predications that it would surpass $1 billion in sales for the first time in history, beating the $922.2m realised last by Sotheby’s in May last year’s Macklowe Collection.

Christie’s predictions turned out to be both true and conservative – Part I of the collection on 9th November saw 60 extraordinary works achieve a total of $1,506,386,000, with five paintings achieving prices above $100 million. The works in the sale sold 100 per cent by lot with 65 per cent of the lots selling above their high estimates. Part II of the collection on 10th November, went on to achieve an additional $115,863,500 for the remaining 95 works offered for sale. In total, the proceeds for the landmark series of sales, totalled and an extraordinary and ground-breaking $1,622,249,500 – all of which is being donated to the various charitable causes Paul Allen established and supported during his lifetime.

What makes the Allen collection so extraordinary, aside from the huge numbers attached to it, is that the collection was put together entirely by Allen himself in less than 30 years. The fact that a collection of such quality and size can still be amassed today, with so many masterworks being in museum collections and out of commercial circulation, is remarkable.

The scope of Allen’s collection is unusual in that it spanned more than 500 years, from Botticelli to Monet, from Picasso to Stella, from Seurat to Hockney. This breadth and variety of collecting is increasingly rare in today’s world, when most collectors tend to focus on a specific area of interest or particular artists, and develop collections which, although important, are more limited in their reach. Paul Allen’s collection and his method of collecting harks back to the height of American collecting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when legendary collectors such as Frick, Rockefeller and Getty scoured the world for masterpieces across all genre and eras – the only prerequisite being quality. This type of collecting is a truly American phenomenon and demonstrates that when there is the rare combination of ambition, taste and limitless money, great things can happen.

What sets the Paul Allen Collection apart from others is the also fact that Allen himself oversaw each and every purchase himself, without the help of the ubiquitous art advisor who is the mainstay of most billionaire collectors. This personal engagement in the collection, reflects Allen’s strong interest in world culture and history, and gives the collection a personality which only great collections possess. As Paul Allen said, “When you look at a painting you’re looking into a different country, into someone else’s imagination, how they saw it.”

It was a given that such an extraordinary collection was always going to achieve extraordinary things when offered at auction – since the market is avaricious for works of this level. Christie’s performed their part superbly, and ran a slick international marketing campaign that promoted the collection worldwide. The results were stupendous.

The highest price achieved in the sale was for Georges Seurat’s 1888 Pointillist masterpiece, Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version), which made $149.2m and smashed the previous Seurat world record by a multiple of four. The world icon is used far too often in modern parlance, but in this case, the word is truly deserved.

Similarly, Paul Cézanne’s 1880-1890 La Montagne Sainte-Victoire – a classic rendering of Cézanne’s most iconic of subjects – also smashed the $100m barrier, achieving $137.8m; and Gustav Klimt’s 1903 painting, Birch Forest, set a world record for a Klimt, selling for $104.6m.

Other notable sales included the highest price ever for a van Gogh painting, Verger avec cyprès, which sold for $117.2m. Paul Gauguin’s 1899, Maternité II made $105.7m, and Lucien Freud’s masterful portrait, Large Interior WII (after Watteau), made $86,265,000.

Further paintings by Éduard Manet, Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, Andrew Wyeth, and Georgia O’Keeffe, all went onto achieve strong prices, alongside sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder and Max Ernst.

In contrast to these masterpieces of Impressionist and Modern Art, the collection also featured a number of significant old master paintings – most notably, Sandro Botticelli’s exquisite, Madonna of the Magnificat, which sold for a ‘relatively’ affordable $48,480,000m, when one considers the rarity of fully autograph works by Botticelli on the market.

One work, Lot 131, demonstrates to me more than any other work, the personal nature of the collection, and the discerning eye of the Paul Allen himself. It also happens to be the most modest work offered for sale. Measuring only 21cm high, it is an exquisite but fragmented Renaissance sculpture showing clasped hands of the Virgin Mary, catalogued as Circle of Donatello. The fact that a man such as Allen, who could afford any masterpiece in the world, was also drawn to such an exquisite but unassuming work, indicates the level of his sophistication, and proves that quality, should lead a collector when buying a work. The market agreed, and the little gem made 26 times its lower estimate and made $252,000.

J is for Jensen

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The eponymous brand Georg Jensen epitomises the best of what we think of as Scandinavian design. Timeless yet innovative; made to the highest standards, yet often deliciously spare and simple. Their current web site opens with the phrase ‘Experience classic Scandinavian design at its most elegant and refined’. There is little to disagree with here, nearly 120 years after Jensen first started to make pieces for the Scandinavian market.

Today there are Georg Jensen shops and franchises worldwide. Producing and selling, jewellery, watches, tableware and giftware. Georg Jensen is perhaps best known for silver and the brand is still much associated with the style and principles of its founder.

It was tragic circumstances that lead Jensen to start producing silver in such a commercial way. He was born in 1866, the son of a knife grinder in a town to the north of Copenhagen. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a goldsmith where he studied for the next four years. Having been a jobbing silver and goldsmith for a further four years, he enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1887, where he studied sculpture.

After graduation he not only started to exhibit as a sculptor, but also started to study ceramics. For some years he tried to make a living as a ceramicist, but when his wife died, he was obliged to find a better way to make an income to support his young family and he turned to the production of silver and jewellery. However, his training in the wider range of fine Arts, a spell studying in Paris, and his interest in the naturalist styles of the Art Nouveau movement, combining flora and fauna into his work, remained a persistent theme and singled his designs out as materially different from those of others.

He was, like the members of the British Arts and Crafts movement, passionate about how pieces were made. He eschewed machinery and what he regarded as ugly mass produced pieces. It is a testament to his design principles and the quality of his manufacturing that many variants of the early designs are still in production today. He was committed to making beautiful pieces that were accessible to all budgets. This was handy, as the materials were less costly and therefore a smaller investment to an impoverished artisan. He used moonstones, amber, enamel, all in silver. After a highly successful early exhibition his pieces were in such demand that it is said he would put a sign in the workshop window saying ‘closed for repairs’, to buy himself some time to make more!

For many years he combined his work as a ceramicist with his silversmithing. The silversmithing was, however, far more lucrative and he had a young family to raise. He bought his first workshop in Copenhagen in 1904 and such was the appeal and quality of his design that by 1924 he had opened retail outlets in Berlin, London and New York. The New York store is of particular interest as it was run independently by Frederick Lunning, who had been a salesman for Jensen in Odense and Copenhagen and also opened the London shop. The first store New York Store, ‘Georg Jensen Handmade Silver’, was followed by a larger store on 5th Avenue selling a variety of homewares. This is still the case today.

One of Jensen’s skills was to recognise talent in others and employ their skills under the Jensen banner. They, in turn subscribed to both the design values and his insistence on high quality hand production. Over the century, Georg Jensen has employed numerous designers including Gundolph Albertus, Johan Rohde, Harald Nielsen and Henning Koppel.

If you own any Jensen pieces you will see, that as well as the classic Jensen stamp, many are signed with the name of their designer and also have a design number. If you acquire a piece of vintage Jensen, you will often be able to use these to trace the piece back to its origins.

He married four times, outliving three wives, he travelled widely, and experienced highs and lows artistically, emotionally and financially. Towards the end of his life, he was interviewed and asked about the purpose of Art. He replied “people worry too much about purpose. The object must…absorb the most beautiful abstracts from the nature that surrounds us.”

Designs showing beautiful abstracts from the nature that surrounds us.

Winslow Homer

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I went to the Winslow Homer exhibition at the National Gallery last week and strongly recommend it to you. It is the first time his work has been shown en masse in the UK and there are no paintings by him in British Public Collections, despite his being a household name in the USA.

He started life painting scenes from the American Civil War and much of his work describes conflict, racial tensions, and other social problems. He also had a real obsession with the sea and spent nearly two years on the Northumbrian coast at Cullercoats, observing and recording the activities of the local fishing community and its struggle with the sea. For Homer, the sea was a source of pleasure, livelihood and terror depending on its mood. He painted numerous scenes of people being rescued from the tempestuous ocean.

I was very struck by a painting executed in 1904, which shows three men wearing sowesters and waterproofs in a rowing boat where the swell is so immense you can’t see the boat , and its title is ‘Kissing the Moon’. It reminded me of a passage in Joseph Conrad’s novella ‘Typhoon,’ where the waves are so great the characters in the boat see the moon disappear below the horizon and when it returns to view, appears to be dripping water. I wondered if this book could have had an influence on Winslow, so I googled it! Conrad began the novel in 1899 and it was subsequently serialized in Pall Mall Magazine between January and March 1902. It was first published in book form by Putnam in New York in 1902, two years before Winslow Homer painted the picture. I think I have answered my own question.

Winslow Homers don’t come up for auction very often, only 68 in the last 35 years. The world record for him (at auction ) was achieved in November 2014, by Sotheby’s in New York, when Mrs Paul Mellon’s ‘Watching the tide go out’, a tiny canvas, just over 12 x 16 in , made $4.5m.

An introduction to NFT’s for brokers – with Jonathan Horwich, Art specialist & Alastair Meiklejon, Senior Valuer

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NFT’s are the latest trend in the art world, but many people do not understand them.

  • What are they?
  • How do they work – how do you “use” them?
  • Why do artists make them?
  • Why do collectors collect them?
  • How are they priced, sold and valued?
  • Are they worth anything?
  • What are the risks in buying them?
  • Can they be insured?

Hocus pocus… Focus on… Amber

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To kick off this mini series of Halloween gems, amber is the chosen first. What could be more spooky than trapped insect containing deadly bacteria…

Prized for its deep rich and warm orange hue, amber is an organic gem, meaning that it is created from living or once living organism, it is fossilized tree resin dating tens of millions of years. It is composed of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Nicknamed “the gold of the North”, it is most commonly found on Northern Europe’s beaches, washed away with the ocean tides. It can also be dug from the ground and deposits have also been found in the Dominican Republic, Myanmar (Burma) and Mexico.

There is a distinction to be made between amber and copal amber. The latter refers to amber which fossilized less than a million years ago. But who’s counting!! It is also fossilized tree resin and is formed in the same manner. One cannot differentiate between the two using a magnifying glass, but rather by using “granny’s old tricks”. Some say that rubbing copal amber on the heel of your hand will emit a smell, others suggest a drop of acetone or even gasoline to determine copal from mature amber: amber is unaffected by acetone whereas copal softens the material. Either way, probably best to avoid doing at home and damaging one’s precious jewel!

Like with all gems, it takes very specific conditions to create amber. It takes a few million years for resin to harden. Once it has hardened it lays under sediment in an oxygen-free environment. It turns to copal amber. It then takes a few more million years to become more stable with the effects of heat and pressure applied to the copal amber to become amber. Research shows that the deposits found in the Baltic and Dominican Republic came from extended immersion under seawater.

Because of its relative softness – rating at 2/2.5 on the Mohs scale (talc powder rates at 1) – it is not commonly cut with facets, but rather polished into beads or free-form pieces.

Jewellery made of amber tend to be big pieces. The reason for it being the lightness of this gem, making it a perfect candidate to wear around one’s neck without feeling weighed down.

The most prized amber pieces are typically transparent, dark reddish hue. However, amber also comes in white and treatments to enhance colour can modify its appearance totally. Heat treatment and dying are commonly used to enhance amber and one distinct mark to look for are sun spangles. Heating amber can cause fracture-like marks: sun spangles.

Amber is a treasured gem because of the secrets they can unveil. The insects, fauna and animals they have sometimes captured tell a tale.

Inclusions play a huge part in the final value of amber but often if the inclusion is perfect, then it probably is too perfect to be real.

It can be extremely difficult to trust authentic amber with inclusions, such as this piece for sale on eBay for $129,000:

And this perfectly preserved scorpion, also on for sale at eBay for £4.90! :

When in doubt and spending a large amount, always ask for a report from a reputable laboratory.

Man-made or real, amber with insect inclusions make the perfect jewellery piece for trick or treating!

Hocus pocus… Focus on… Skull Jewellery

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Skull jewellery and gemstones

Skulls. Usually not what comes to mind when talking about jewellery design and carved gems. However, skull jewels, and especially rings, have had a long tradition of being part of one’s collection.

The appeal may not be so obvious but it is one that continues to be popular throughout times.

Why a skull? It acts as a reminder. That life is not forever and days are counted. That one should live every day to the fullest, carpe diem. And what’s not to love about that message? Embracing one’s life and accepting your fate, not always fighting against the things we cannot control.

In more recent years, Theo Fennell is recognised as one of the top fashion jewellers to use this symbol of life and has used all sorts of gemstones in his creations to amplify his creations.

If rings are not your go to jewellery item this Halloween, then perhaps a pendant necklace by the same designer could be an option.

Halloween calls for creativity, so this year, why not trade in the pumpkin for a carved gem skull? Sure to get your neighbours quivering in their boots and make a bold statement.

There are a multitude of options. In keeping with the orange theme of the pumpkin, a citrine skull could be an option.

Quartz, which citrine is a variety of, has a hardness of 7/7.5 on the Mohs scale and makes it a good candidate to get sharp edges to carve the teeth and a pointy nose.

It can also come other colours such as purple amethyst:

Or even blue:

A wide variety of options is available on the market, including at specialized auctions.

Bonhams sold this lot in Los Angeles in 2017 for $1,187 incl premium. It includes an amethyst obelisk decorated with twenty carved skulls, Height 11in; a sculpture comprising three skulls with a butterfly, carved of boulder opal from Queensland, Australia, length 5 1/2 in; together with a Mexican black obsidian carving of a skull with owl perched, height 6 1/2 in.

But possibly the most “out of this world” carved skull must be a sculpture sold in 2015 at Bonhams in Los Angeles, carved out of meteorite, making it the largest Gibeon meteorite carving in the world.

Gibeon meteorites are iron-based and “originated billions of years ago from unstable planet that existed briefly between Jupiter and Mars.

When the planet broke apart, a section of its core travelled through space for four billion years.” It penetrated the Earth’s atmosphere about 1,000 years ago and landed in Namibia.

This particular 21kgs life-sized carving, nicknamed Yorick, was created from a 280kgs meteorite. It is one of the rarest forms of meteorite.

The choice is vast for Halloween decorations whether for the house or fashionwear. All one needs to do now is pick the right outfit for a night of trick or treating…

Brown and out – The confusing world of antique furniture

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In the world of antique furniture, there is nothing that raises temperatures, or gives a better reason for an argument than the rather broad term of brown furniture, but what does it actually mean and is the market for such items truly as doomed as many people would want you to believe?

Firstly, lets back track about 23 years. The 1990s were coming to a close, Lovejoy had been cancelled, Ikea was becoming a love/hate word in the English vocabulary and traditional antique furniture that had been the mainstay of the collectible and usable market had started to hit hard times. The re-discovery of mid-century modern furniture had started to fit with people’s lifestyles and the necessity for a Victorian gentleman’s compac tum had waned.

At this stage, demand had simply dropped and by the 2010s one c ould buy a Victorian chest of drawers, built by a craftsman, from a fine imported mahogany for pretty much the same as a cardboard box full of Swedish chipboard that you would have to spent hours putting together yourself – it just doesn’t seem right, does it?

However ‘Brown furniture’ isn’t simply the row of beaten-up Edwardian sideboards in a local auction house, it includes some of the most glorious items ever made as functional pieces – and to place all items of furniture into a single category, just because they are made from wood seems a little absurd.

The market today for fine antique furniture is perhaps not as s trong as it was in those days when anyone would pay at least a £1000 for something that start ed with “Georgian” but looking at retail markets now, there are fine and rare pieces a vailable for well in excess of what many people would give them credit for.

So what does the future hold for the ‘Brown Furniture’ market?

Let us not kid ourselves, do we really think that the modern, almost disposable lifestyles that people live in 2022 are going to ever need a chest of drawers w ith a brushing slide? Do we think that suddenly every house will need a drop leaf bureau and that writing letters will suddenly become popular again?

Of course, the answer to both of these questions is no, but – the market for customers that actually do desire these items will only go up as the collectors market still strives to own the best, and only the best.

So when your clients say “we have some brown furniture, but it’s not really worth anything anymore” it might be worth getting it looked at…

William and Mary Burr Elm Chest on Stand 25,000

Regency Mahogony dressing mirror £8,000 Regency Ebonised and Brass desk chair - £15,000

L.S. Lowry – Going to the match

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Lowry’s painting, ‘Going to the Match’ from 1953 depicts a bustling throng of football fans gathered at the former home of Bolton Wanderers. It won Lowry first prize in a 1953 exhibition, which was sponsored by The Football Association.

Jonathan Horwich with L.S Lowry's 'Going to the match'.

Jonathan Horwich with L.S Lowry’s ‘Going to the match’.

The painting, last came up for auction in December 1999, just days away from the new millennium and the dawn of the new technology that has changed all our lives and turbo charged the Art and Auction world.

The estimate back then was £700-900,000 which was itself a world record estimate and the final price of £1.9 million was also a new record which stood for almost 10 years! ‘Going to the Match’ was bought by Graham Taylor, bidding via phone, on behalf of the Professional Footballers Association, (PFA) the footballer’s Trade Union.

From the auction it went on long term loan to the Lowry in Salford, where until April this year it was on permanent display to the public.

Last night in London, 22 years on, it was back on the auction block, again with a world record estimate of £5-8 million and after a fierce auction battle it deservedly made a new world auction record price of £7.8, far exceeding the previous record for a Lowry of £5.6 million set in 2011.

The PFA recently transferred ownership of the picture to their charitable arm, the Players Foundation so that now all the sale proceeds
will go towards helping those in need. Even better, thanks to the generosity of the Law Family charitable trust run by Andrew and Zoe Law, the Lowry Gallery in Salford were able to bid successfully at the auction and so now they will soon have their visitor’s favourite Lowry picture back again on the wall in Salford Quays so we can all enjoy it now and into the future.

Ametrine

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Ametrine is a form of quartz. It combines both the purple amethyst and the yellow citrine all into one stone, making it somewhat of a unique specimen. To add to this uniqueness, commercial ametrine is only found in Bolivia, and more precisely in the mine of Anahi.

What do we mean by commercial? Stones that are of a particular quality that can be cut and set into jewellery.

The mine was named after a legendary princess of the 1600s who married a Spanish conquistador and was given the mine as dowry. The mine located in a very remote area of Bolivia, was lost for centuries. Research shows that the mine was only rediscovered in the mid-50s, only accessible by plane and small boats.

Ametrine displays the same properties as amethystand citrine. Ametrine rates a 7/10 on the Mohs scale. The Mohs scale of mineral hardness was created by Friedrich Mohs in 1822 and determines the scratch resistance of minerals when scratches by another mineral.

The Mohs scale is used to manufacture everyday objects: your mobile phone’s screen glass is made of a material that scratches at level 6, some at level 7. Ametrine therefore has good toughness and is suitable to be set in jewellery, such as this sapphire and ametrine torsade necklace which sold at auction for $408 (pictured below).

It can be noticed that ametrine is most commonly found in jewellery as a rectangular-cut stone. This cut displays the bi-colour property of the gem, exposing both colours at its best, with the clear demarcation between the yellow and the purple. The most prized ametrine will display fine transparency, a good contrast of colours and an equal balance between the two colours. Though it rates rather high on the Mohs scale, its colour can fade if exposed for long periods of time to too much bright light. If ametrine is worn in jewellery, its wearer should be aware of its possibility to scratch and chip if not cared for properly.

How would one care for its ametrine-set jewels? The best and safest way to clean your jewellery is with good old fashion soap and warm water and not exposing it to high heat. It is preferable not to place the gem in an ultrasonic in case the stone or others in the piece of jewellery have been dyed or fracture filled (the machine’s vibrations will remove the modifications).

Because of its extraordinary features, ametrine is often carved into fantasy-cuts.

An ametrine carving of rooster by Gerd Dreher sold at auction for $12,575. Dreher is a German animal figure carver, the fourth generation of Dr eher in this line of activity. He was born in 1943 in Idar- Oberstein, one of the most important gemstone centres in the world with the finest lapidaries and gem cutters.

This gem-set obelisk / jewellery box by Manfred Wild (pictured top right) remained unsold at $200,000- 250,000. Wild aas born in 1944 in Kirshvayler near Idar-Oberstein. He is the eighth representative of the family dynasty that has been engaged in lapidary art since 1630. Manfred Wild is sometimes called “The 21st century Fabergé”.

Ametrine is used in a wide range of carvings for its intriguing features. It is not uncommon to see jewels set with ametrine but it seems to be slightly underappreciated for what it is: an exceptional wonder of nature who combines two stones into one giving it a delightful play with colours.