Category Archives: David Dallas News

John Constable and the Stour Valley

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I can’t think of a painter who was as influenced by, or devoted to recording the landscape of his boyhood, as John Constable R.A. (1776-1837). He is famously recorded as saying: “Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate ‘my careless boyhood’ with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful.”

He was born in East Bergholt in Suffolk and the villages of the Stour Valley were the subjects of his early work. However, as Michael Rosenthal points out in his excellent book ‘Constable, the painter and his landscape’ published in 1983, it was not all plain sailing. Despite the familiarity and love of the place, there were emotional associations that precluded Constable painting certain aspects of his childhood landscape. For instance, he was incapable of painting land owned by his father, Golding, a successful farmer, mill owner and grain merchant, until Golding came to terms with is son’s desire to become a painter. Golding wanted him to join and then run the family business, as John’s elder brother had learning difficulties. By 1799, Golding had relented to some extent, granted his son a small allowance and John then entered the Royal Academy Schools.

In 1808 Golding gave him a small grain store in East Bergholt to convert into a studio, now owned by my friend, Susan Morris. She’s the only one of my friends who has a fridge magnet of her house! Father and son were truly reconciled.

In 1816 he married Maria Bicknell, whom he had known since 1809. Their love was a source of great comfort to Constable, but the union was not approved of by Maria’s grandfather, Dr Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt, who threatened to disinherit her. He thought the Constables were socially inferior. However, Golding and Ann Constable died in quick succession and John inherited one fifth of the family business, which eased the financial pressure.

Now with several children to support, he embarked on an ambitious plan to enhance his reputation by producing large canvases for exhibition in both London and Paris. He returned to his beloved Stour Valley for these and produced a series of ‘six footers’ (the size of the canvas), of which the most famous is ‘The Hay Wain’.

It was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1824, where it caused a sensation, because of its vibrant technique and colour and its truth to nature. It was awarded a gold medal by Charles X. Delacroix repainted the background of his ‘Massacre de Scio’, as a result of seeing it.

By the early 1820s, Maria was showing signs of tuberculosis and Constable took lodgings in Brighton for her health. He made numerous drawings of the South Downs and Coast, and produced a marvellous oil painting of the ‘Chain Pier, Brighton’, which was exhibited in 1827. Sadly, the sea air did not save Maria and after the birth of their seventh child, Maria died in November 1828. Constable was distraught. He wrote to his brother, also called Golding, ‘hourly do I feel the loss of my departed angel…the face of the world is totally changed for me’.

The period following Maria’s death was a profoundly melancholic one for Constable. He dressed in black and was prone to anxiety. I always think that Hadleigh Castle sums up Constable’s state of mind at this time. A lonely figure and his dog stand beside the ruined castle, whilst a storm approaches from the sea, with just two shafts of light to suggest some source of hope. The palette is subdued but the brushwork vigorous, the product of a troubled mind.

On a less sombre note, there is a charming story that Constable relates to his friend Archdeacon Fisher of Salisbury. He was travelling in the 1820s in a carriage from Ipswich to London with two strangers. By way of making conversation, he pointed out of the window and remarked “Don’t you think this is a beautiful landscape?” One of the strangers said “yes I do, Sir, but you should remember this is Constable country.”

Old Master Sales, July, London

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The Old Master Sales in London last week proved once again that freshness to the market and condition are key to paintings achieving spectacular prices. The perfect example of this was the beautiful Artist’s Studio with a Seamstress by the enigmatic Flemish painter Michael Sweerts (1618-1664), which came up at Christie’s.

This was painted in Rome sometime between 1646-1652 and was unknown to scholars having spent most of its life in a Belgian castle. It had never been cleaned or lined in its almost 400 year history and sold for an astonishing £12.6M (including premium), 6 times the previous world record for the artist! Christie’s also had a pair of recently re-discovered portraits by Rembrandt (1606-1669) which hadn’t been seen since 1824. Despite being on tiny oak panels measuring just 8 ½ x 6 ½ ins they made a well-deserved £11.2M (including premium).

One of the stars of Sotheby’s evening sale was the panel of the Pentecost by the unidentified 15th Century Bruges Painter, known as The Master of the Baroncelli Portraits. Despite appearing as recently as 2010 at Christie’s, where it sold for £4.19M, its beautiful execution and almost pristine condition helped it soar to £7.9M.

Sotheby’s also had a distinguished re-discovery in the form of a Saint Sebastian by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). This canvas was probably painted in Rome around 1608 for the Spinola family of Genoa, but had spent most of the last 100 years in St Louis, Missouri, USA undetected. It had appeared at an auction there in 2008, catalogued as attributed to Laurent de la Hire (sic). With its new attribution, it sold for £4.9M.

The week of sales totalled well over £100M, the best result for 6 years with Christie’s evening sale generating £53.9M, while Sotheby’s came in at £39M. The day sales, of lesser fry, were much quieter with slightly higher BI rates. Sotheby’s sale totalled £911,000, Bonhams £1.35M and Christie’s just over £2M. On average, 70% of the lots offered found buyers on the day and more will have sold subsequently suggesting that although Old Masters are not as fashionable as contemporary paintings, there is still a market for them.

How to look after paintings

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Pictures, like small children, prefer consistency of treatment. In the case of paintings and watercolours this means no violent fluctuations in temperature or humidity.

If you have a damp room a de-humidifier can bring the relative humidity down to around 40%-60%, above this level and there is a possibility of mould growing on surfaces and this can stain the paper on which watercolours, drawings and prints have been worked, irrevocably. Some moisture in the air is good, especially for inlaid furniture and panel pictures. I was in the Pinacoteca in Bologna 40 years ago, where there was about zero relative humidity and the great wooden altarpieces were groaning like ships’ timbers, as they dried out and moved. It’s not like that now!

water damage - caring for paintings

Hanging paintings above radiators or chimney breasts is to be avoided as the paint layer dries out and becomes brittle and if the painting is on a panel it can warp. The same applies to furniture.

Direct sunlight is a no-no, especially for watercolours. I remember seeing a large pair of watercolours by Turner hanging in a lightwell. They had been there since 1800 when the owner’s forbear had bought them at Christie’s. I tracked the sale. Instead of being worth £200,000 (they were obviously very early ones) they were worth about £5,000 as curiosities. All the colour had been bleached out – no blues, no greens, just pale pink and brown smudges. What a tragedy!

light damage on a painting

Whether light travels in waves or pulses, it equals heat and this will damage anything subjected to it. Ultra violet inhibiting strips can be put on windows, but they are only about 60% effective and should not be exclusively relied upon. Old-fashioned velvet curtains, with brass rods stretched through the bottoms are an ideal way of protecting watercolours in daytime and can, be turned back at night.

Artificial lighting can be harmful too, although it lacks the sun’s power, so low energy bulbs should be used and try to avoid picture lights on brass arms attached to the frame of an oil painting. They are too close to the surface of the painting and can cause stress to an old carved and gilded frame.

The cleaning of all paintings must be left to well-trained professional conservators. It is a highly complex procedure requiring in-depth knowledge of chemistry. Never use a damp cloth to clean the gilding on a frame. If it is water-based gilding, as opposed to oil, it will dissolve. A feather duster is preferable to a cloth duster as it is less likely to snag the carving and pull it off. You can dust the surface of an oil painting, very gently, with a cloth duster.

caring for paintings - feather duster

Lastly, never dust the glass on a pastel, it can cause static electricity to build up and the pastel (powdery chalk), which was never treated with a fixative in the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries, will jump off the paper and adhere to the inside of the glass!

Some things you just have to live with such as houseflies whose poo can stain an oil painting and can only be removed with a scalpel (don’t try this yourself!).

Thunderflies, in high summer, can find their way under the tightest-fitting glass and litter the surface of a watercolour or drawing. Wait until autumn and take the backing off the work on paper, dust them out and reseal. Silverfish are a menace. If they get into a Victorian watercolour they can munch their way through the pigments, which have been impregnated with gum Arabic (the substance that Osama Bin Laden’s family fortune was based on) leaving patches of bald paper. Try to keep on top of silverfish by regular hoovering.

It is a very good idea to have your paintings regularly valued, which will involve keeping a good photographic record. This could prove very useful to a conservator and loss adjuster should you have the misfortune to have water or fire damage.

The Nude

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For the next in my series of articles on what inspires artist to paint, I have chosen The Nude. This is such a vast subject, that I intend to look at Western Art, exploring only paintings from the Renaissance to the present day. Of course sculpture has a very important part to play in the history of The Nude, but for the most part, I am going to ignore it for brevity’s sake.

Sir Kenneth Clark, as he was then, in his brilliant book “The Nude”, (published by John Murray 1956), begins chapter one thus:

“The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguished between the naked and the nude. Naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some of the embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body re-formed.”

Since classical antiquity, the human body has been central to art. We are mostly familiar with sculpture, as so little painting has survived. During the Renaissance, excavations of ancient sites in Rome, Naples and elsewhere unearthed a vast treasure trove of naked gods and goddesses.

These antiquities invited scholars, collectors and artists alike to embrace a classical notion of ideal beauty and Diana, Venus, Danae, Sea Nymphs and various other creations of Greek and Roman mythology became a rich seam for admirers of the nude to mine. Gods and goddesses seldom wore clothes!

The Bible, too has a store of subjects involving the nude from Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden to Lot and his daughters and Bathsheba.

The obvious potential for eroticism, was reduced by certain conventions in depicting the nude. The bodies, although adult, were hairless and had the look of polished marble rather than flesh – the look of a classical statue, as opposed to a “page 3” girl. This anodyne look, with a few subtle variations, lasted until the mid-19th Century.

There was a convention that allowed little boys to be painted completely naked and they are, frequently, as Cupid and Putti (winged cherubs). Little girls, however, have their lower abdomens covered by draperies. Sometimes adult females are draped too but the folds in the draperies often merely accentuate what is hidden.

The 17th Century ushers in a new aesthetic in Western painting. The dramatic light and shade of Caravaggio’s art in Italy found its way to the North of Europe, via Utrecht artists who worked in Rome. Rembrandt was one who embraced this new realism. When he painted his mistress, Hendrikje Stoffels, as “Bathsheba at Her Bath”, she is very much a woman of flesh and blood. Rembrandt records her rather large feet and hands and slightly tubby torso. He also includes the lump in her left breast, which may have been the cause of her death, aged 39, but her death may have been caused by the Plague, which killed thousands in Amsterdam in 1663. In any event, she is nothing like the classical ideal nude of a century earlier.

With the painting of François Boucher in 18th Century Paris, we return to a notion of ideal beauty. Against a background of political and social turmoil, Boucher depicts a world where elegant and beautiful gods and goddesses float and frolic blissfully.

In the 19th Century painters had a new and potentially devastating invention to contend with, photography. What could a painter do, that a photograph could not? The answer is, interpret the object in front of it, rather than merely record it, which is why, nearly 200 years after the invention of photography we still have war artists.

Édouard Manet’s “Olympia”, exhibited at The Paris Salon in 1865, is partly a return to the ideal, with Olympia’s marmoreal body, but it is also a snapshot of the moment her maid arrives with a bunch of flowers.

In England, three decades after Olympia, John William Godward is painting Campaspe as a living sculpture. She is not as pale as Olympia, but she is definitely statuesque and conventional, to conform with Victorian sensibilities. It is worth remembering that some Victorians draped the legs of their pianos, as legs were suggestive – of what I wonder? Furthermore, librarians separated books by male and female authors, lest they jostle against one another on the bookshelves – I think I know what they are getting at, the possibility of two books turning into a library.

Now we come to the 20th Century, when, as we all know, the rule book is thrown out of the window. There is no norm. Whilst Amadeo Modigliani, is painting an ideal nude, inspired by Italian Renaissance painting, Picasso is producing Cubist nudes in strokes of muted grey and Egon Schiele is producing sexually explicit nudes, which still have the power to shock profoundly and are the subject of censorship in many parts of the world. I’m not going to illustrate one!

Surrealism, of course, has its own take on the nude and Rene Magritte’s “Attempting the Impossible” of 1928 has the artist wearing a brown suit painting a living female nude model in 3-D, standing in the same space that he occupies. It is a witty take on Art imitating Art. The model is little more than a painted statue.

No Study of The Nude is complete without an in depth look at the work of Lucian Freud, a man obsessed with the nude, although he hated the word. In his maturity, he possessed a technique which uses thick impasto (paint) with light scumbles (like light washes) over the top to create a sense of the colour and texture of living flesh. Freud’s sitters are as far removed from the ideal as it is possible to be. The men often appear vulnerable and awkward, as do many of his women.

Sue Tilley, the model for one of his most famous nude portraits, “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping”, became a muse for him in the 1990s. The painting of her asleep on a sofa in Freud’s studio is a masterpiece of observation, empathy and reportage. She is seen from above, lying on his sofa, and the sense of her volume and the space she occupies is breathtaking. She sold at Christie’s for $33.6M, which, at the time, was the world record for a living artist.

The Nude has provoked much thought and inspired the spilling of litres of ink over the centuries. The Guerilla Girls, a group of anonymous American female artists produced a poster of Ingres’ “Grande Odalisque”, a white-skinned female nude seen from behind, with a gorilla’s head and in bold type posed the question: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” It went on to say “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female”.

Through all the convulsions and twists that art has taken from the Renaissance, through Abstraction to the modern day, it is interesting to reflect that Life Classes, drawing the human body using a live model, still go on in every corner of the globe. There are three within a five mile radius of where I live ! To be able to draw the human form is clearly the starting point of all art.

World record prices at auction for the artists mentioned:

Lucas Cranach £9.43M
Cavaliere d’Arpino £325,000
Rembrandt van Rijn £20.2M
François Boucher $2.4M
Édouard Manet $65.126M
John William Godward £1.3M
Amadeo Modigliani $170M
Pablo Picasso $179M
Rene Magritte £59.4M
Lucian Freud $86.2M

New York Leads the Way in Old Masters

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The recent Old Master Sales in New York, at the end of January, were in marked contrast to the December results in London. For a start, there were many more sales, three of them single owner catalogues, but then there are probably more serious collectors of Old Masters in the New York and Boston areas, than the rest of the world put together!

The combined sales of Christie’s and Sotheby’s totalled $171.5M (£139.4M), beating the previous New York record of $133M (£97.1M), achieved in 2021 and dwarfing the £51.05M for London in December.

Apart from the huge number of good collections and collectors in the Eastern Seaboard of the USA, a minor contributing factor to the success of that arena, is that New York is the favoured destination for UK dealers to place their “sleepers” (discoveries), which, like all paintings, will forfeit 20% of their gross profit if sold in the UK. The USA is treated as an export sale and, therefore, is exempt for dealers operating under “The Special Scheme” for art and antiques.

I have chosen three pictures from these sales to illustrate, because they are the three I would most like to take home, perhaps in my next life.

The continued strengthening of prices for Old Masters means that anyone who owns one should consider having it revalued.

A review of the December Old Master Sales in London

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December is an exciting month, not just because Christmas is coming, it is also the last hurrah for the Old Master Painting season in London. Sotheby’s had the better pictures and therefore, the better of the results. Their Day Sale (lesser fry) at a total of £3.34M was roughly three times the value of Christie’s at £1.185M. Furthermore, Christie’s had a large total of lots unsold on the day, 40 out of 104 lots.

The Evening Sale (the top lots) followed a similar pattern with Sotheby’s sale to talling £32.72M, with Christie’s coming in at a more modest £13.14M. In fact, Sotheby’s top lot, Titian’s ‘Venus and Adonis’, at £11.1M made almost as much, on its own, as Christie’s whole sale.

They had a beautiful still life by the Haarlem painter Floris van Dijck, very similar in composition to the painting in the Rijksmuseum and one of my favourite pictures in that collection. This made £2.09M against a pre-sale estimate of £600,000-£800,000.

Also estimated at £600,000 – £800,000 was a dramatic seascape by Ivan Konstantinov Aivazovsky titled ‘The Wrath of the Seas’. I was particularly interested to see what happened to this painting, by a 19th Century Russian artist, bearing in mind what is going on in Ukraine. On the day it made a very healthy £1.729M, proving that Aivazovsky has an international reputation and is not just for local consumption!

During the view at Christie’s, I was intrigued to speculate what would happen to two portraits, in particular. The first was a portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger, court painter to Henry VIII and the second was, to my mind, a very beautiful portrait of Henrietta Maria, by Sir Anthony van Dyck, court painter to Charles I.

In the event, they both disappointed with the Holbein making £1.12M against an estimate of £1-1.5M and the Van Dyck limping away at £2.44M against an estimate of £2-4M. The highest price was £2.92M (estimate £2-3M) for ‘Reading Party’ by the French Rococo artist Jean Francois de Troy.

These sales told us nothing new about taste for Old Masters, but they did reinforce what I said in July and that is that there is keen interest in paintings by good hands, fresh to the market and in good state. Selling lesser things, which have been seen before, is a struggle.

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.

Reflections on Her Majesty

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At this time of national mourning, I think it is important to reflect on the many happy moments in the life of Her Majesty. My younger sister, Amanda, has a sweet photograph of her late and much-lamented husband, taking The Queen to inspect the Guard at Balmoral. They are laughing as they chat.

The year is 1982 and Major (as he was then) Ian Chant-Sempill, my brother-in-law, was on his second stint at Balmoral, one of the cushiest three month postings in the army! The Guard is always drawn from Highland Regiments, in Ian’s case, The Gordon Highlanders. He became their last Colonel before they amalgamated with the Queen’s own Highlanders to form The Highlanders. The officers of the Guard were invited stalking, shooting on the estate and to fish the River Dee. Ian was a very good fisherman and caught 27 salmon during his tour of duty, which I believe is a record.

One night at dinner at Balmoral, poached salmon was on the menu. The Queen leant across the table and said: “ I think this is one of yours, Ian”. Amanda sat next to Prince Andrew, who had just returned from the Falklands, and Koo Stark was there, too. Charles and Diana were newly-weds and the days seemed carefree.

Note: My dear brother-in-law, Ian, had very good Artworld credentials. He was the Great Grandson of Sir John Lavery, R.S.A., R.A., R.H.A. Christie’s currently holds the world record for a Lavery at auction, with “The Croquet Party”, sold on March 22nd this year, for £2.922m (inc. premium).

Footnote: Amanda and Ian also dined on several occasions with HM The Queen Mother at Birkhall, her residence on the Balmoral estate.

On one famous occasion they were asked to arrive early for drinks and sat down promptly at 8pm for dinner in the dining room, which contained no fewer than nine grandmother clocks! At 8.19pm, having consumed three courses, the Queen Mother said “shall we have coffee in the sitting room?” She didn’t want to miss the start of “Dad’s Army”! She turned to Amanda and said “I do so love Arthur Lowe”.

When the programme was over, they all played racing demon on the floor.

The Light of the World

The last version of the Light of the World by William Holman Hunt o.m. (1827-1910)

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This famous painting, ‘The last version of the Light of the World’, nearly life size, hangs in St Paul’s Cathedral, where it is admired by thousands of visitors every year. Sales of postcards and bookmarks of it also run to thousands annually. Very few people, however, will know of its peregrinations before it arrived in St Paul’s.

The painting was commissioned by Charles Booth, a rich ship owner and friend of the Hunts in 1903, by which time Holman Hunt was virtually blind, a combination of glaucoma and working in that minute painstaking Pre-Raphaelite way had taken its toll. So most of the painting was done by E R Hughes under Holman Hunt’s instruction, but this fact was not made public and Hunt took all the credit. When the painting was finished, it was decided that it should go on exhibition to the Christian parts of the Empire.

After a brief exhibition at the Fine Art Society in the Spring of 1904, ‘The last version of the Light of the World’ and its vast frame, together they weighed just under a ton, were crated up and sent to Glasgow. They set sail for Halifax, Nova Scotia in February 1905. In Halifax, where frame and canvas were reunited, it was exhibited in the York Theatre Assembly Rooms. Booth had already employed two men to accompany it and a third was hired here with the sole task of removing it from its frame in under three minutes in case of fire. Percy Fennell, one of its custodians, gave lectures about its symbolism during day and took up station in a hammock beside it at night, with a loaded revolver at the ready. From Halifax the painting went by train to Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg. It reached Vancouver in September.

From Canada, it travelled to Australia. In Sydney it was seen by 25,000 visitors a day. People thought they had seen Jesus. They prayed in front of the painting, fainted and had profound religious experiences. The crowds in Sydney were pushing through turnstiles at the rate of one person every 2.99 seconds, ‘ladies had their hats crushed, sashes torn and blouses deranged’, to quote a local journalist and the Police struggled to keep order.

“The Light of the World” visited Adelaide, Broken Hill, Melbourne and Sydney and then arrived in Auckland, New Zealand on the morning of Easter Day, April 15th, 1906. After Auckland, it spent a day in New Plymouth and then went by train to Wanganui (I once sold to the National Gallery of New Zealand some drawings made by a Scots doctor of his house and garden which was the first building in what became Wanganui. I hadn’t a clue about the importance of what I was selling and completely under-sold them. I’m happy they found their way home, however!)

In Palmerston North it was displayed in the Opera House, where 15,000 people came to see it. Then on it went to Napier, Wellington, Christchurch and finally Invercargill. After a terrifyingly stormy crossing of the Tasman Sea it arrived in Hobart. Artificial lighting in Hobart was a problem, but the Tasmanian Woolgrower’s Association had a vast and well-lit warehouse, which they offered as a venue. “The Light of the World” was exhibited there, propped up on sacks of wheat, surrounded by bales of wool and seen by over 11,000 visitors in the first two days.

It made a return trip to Adelaide. The Director of the Museum there wrote a letter to Booth thanking him for the loan and telling him that 104,000 people had seen it in eight days. After exhibitions in Brisbane and Rockhampton, it set sail for Capetown and was shown there. It was also exhibited in Durban, Pietermaritsburg and Johannesburg, where, just as in Australasia, it drew vast crowds, 25,000 in Johannesburg alone.

By the time it returned home in 1907 after two years abroad, it had been seen by more than seven million people. It is extraordinary to reflect on what an impact this old fashioned, latter-day Pre-Raphaelite painting made on Britons and their empire when one considers that Fauvism was raging in France at the same time and Impressionism was dead.

But what of the model for Jesus, then one of the most recognisable images on the planet. He was called Domenico Mancini (b.1873) and he was a handsome, athletic lad who stood over six feet tall. He and six or seven siblings left Picinisco, the highest village in the Abruzzi mountains in central Italy and settled in Hammersmith in the late 1880s. They became barrow boys, often defending their pitches with their fists. Domenico’s nephew, Alf, in fact, became a professional boxer and had a career of 148 fights, between 1920 and 1931, starting as a featherweight and ending up a middleweight. The Golden Gloves pub in Fulham Palace Road, owned by the Mancini family, was a famous local landmark, when I first arrived in London.

It was in 1889 that the good-looking Domenico was first approached by Sir William Blake Richmond to model for him. Richmond had settled in Hammersmith after his second marriage and was an Italian speaker, having worked for some years with Nino Costa and the Etruscan school. He was also an old friend of Holman Hunt and may well have introduced the two.

It wasn’t long before Domenico suggested to his brothers that they, too, could make a decent living as models, posing in the studio in the winter and keeping costermongering for the summer months.

In the end, Domenico gave up the street life and became a professional model for the rest of his days. Amongst others, he posed for Alma Tadema, Sargent, Frank Brangwyn and Sir Jacob Epstein. He is the boy riding the horse in G F Watts’s magnificent sculpture “Physical Energy” in Kensington Gardens. He wore Edward VII’s robes for a state portrait of the King. Whilst posing for this, they had to slice the King’s patent pumps to accommodate Domenico’s bunions! Getting models to pose for portraits, notably full-length ones, is a tradition going back centuries. Grandees, and especially monarchs, have better things to do than stand for hours in heavy clothing. John Evelyn described going into Van Dycks studio and seeing, propped up against the wall, countless eight foot canvases of men in armour. This work was carried out by assistants. The portraits had no hands and their faces were blank ovals waiting for the great man to paint the important bits from life.

Last, but by no means least, his legs were used by Alfred Drury for his sculpture of Sir Joshua Reynolds, completed in 1931 and now in the courtyard of the Royal Academy, most of us will have seen them. Domenico Mancini died in 1958, the year I went to prep school.

NB

This article was only made possible by the brilliant, scholarly research done on the painting by Jeremy Maas, an old friend of mine and father of Rupert, who entertained our Wednesday Club in his gallery in the Summer. Jeremy published a 240 page book on this one painting in 1984. I dedicate the article to his memory.

Reflections on the old master sales

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It is hard to know what to make of the Old Master Sales at the beginning of July. The totals of Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams at under £50m were only just above half of what they were last year at £80m.

The wonderful Lucas Cranach (lot 6 in Christie’s evening sale) of the Nymph of the Spring, a naked girl in a rocky river landscape, sold for £9.4m. More than the whole of the Sotheby’s Evening Sale put together (£7.1m).

There were some strong individual prices, just not enough of them. I’ve chosen 3 pictures from last weeks crop of Old Masters to write about, one from each of the major London salerooms.

What these three have in common is that they are all in beautiful state and, to my mind, are attractive images, but they are all slightly old-fashioned English “Country House” taste. It was going to be very interesting to see how they fared, in a market obsessed with the quirky and the novel.

My Bonhams choice was lot 60, a fine horse portrait by James Seymour. It was described as “a brown thoroughbred”, traditionally identified as “Spanking Roger”. I thought the presence of two foxhounds and a groom who looked as if he was wearing Beaufort Hunt livery implied that he was a hunter, but my brother-in-law, Hamish Alexander, who is in the racing world said the horse was too fine-boned to be a hunter. I take his word for it. He is an expert and Bonhams got it right.

Despite a suggestion that the signature and date were added later, he galloped away from an estimate of £30,000-50,000 to a very respectable £157,000.

My Sotheby’s choice was the star lot, a marvellous Willem van de Velde the Younger of “The Surrender of the Royal Prince during the Four Days’ Battle”. Although the subject was war, there was no gore, not too many burning vessels, nor drowning sailors and the composition was well -balanced and harmonious, but it didn’t find a buyer. I think the problem was the estimate; at £4-6m the top end was already a world record for the artist at auction. At half that estimate, it would have sailed away.

We finish on an optimistic note! Christie’s offered, as lot 12 in their evening sale, a Pastoral Landscape by Jacob van Ruisdael, the great Haarlem landscape painter. There was a panel join in the sky, but it hardly showed and the evening sun catching the sandy bank of the stream in the foreground, was just the sort of touch that appealed so much in Jacob’s work to John Constable. He owned four of them and made copies of others. This painting more than doubled the estimate with the price of £3.4m including buyer’s premium. It was painted in oil on a small oak panel, just over 2 feet wide and it was a very gentle subject, but it struck a chord in the hearts of several bidders.

If there is a lesson to be learned from these sales, it is that good Old Masters still command strong prices, but it is difficult for auctioneers to persuade collectors to part with their paintings in a time of conflict and inflation.