Held in Bond Street on March 20, the sale was brought about by the death last year of Lord Gibson-Watt of Doldowlod, one of the Watt family homes. The collection reflected the whole of Watt’s world: his work and his domestic life. There were the books, pamphlets and scientific instruments connected with his long life as an engineer and inventor and his association with Matthew Boulton’s famous Soho works. Then there were the paintings, silver, ceramics and furniture that one might associate with men whose industrial success had brought them sufficient wealth to equip several houses: Heathfield, Thornhill and Aston Hall in the West Midlands and Doldowlod in Radnorshire.
The provenance alone would be enough to invest this material with interest and value, as was the case with some of the minor entries: the jewels, miniatures and gilt metal trinkets that had an obvious souvenir value or the books that owed their historical interest to the Watts’ personal ownership. But some of the other items in the sale had intrinsic value, being by some of the best craftsmen of their time.
This was certainly the case with the furniture which largely dated from James Watts Junior’s time. He employed the famous Regency cabinetmaker and designer George Bullock to supply furniture for Thornhill, his new house in Handsworth. Then in the 1820s after he had leased Aston Hall, he employed James Bridgens to design Elizabethan-style oak furniture to complement the Jacobean surroundings of his new home.
An impressive suite of ten rosewood dining chairs with Bullock’s trademark brass inlay were the most expensive furniture offering, coming in at a mid-estimate £24,000. It was the more modestly estimated Bridgens ‘Jacobethan’ oak furniture for Aston Hall that produced some of the most dramatic results, like the carved oak night table estimated at £2000-3000 that ended up making £13,000; a 3ft 8in (1.12m) wide Bridgens-attributed dressing table that made £16,500 against the same estimate or the pair of 2ft (62cm) high oak and pollard oak dwarf openwork bookcases, pictured here, that doubled estimate at £12,000.
The most expensive Bridgens entry, however, at a triple-estimate £17,500, was a pair of painted tôle coal purdonia, rare items of fireplace furniture at this early date, bearing the Watt Junior crest of an elephant charged with a cross. A closely related design by Bridgens featured later in this sale as part of a group lot of his designs for Aston which fetched £5000.
Electric atmosphere in the saleroom as unique provenance holds sway
Provenance, Provenance Provenance, this was the key to the runaway success of Sotheby’s 539-lot, £1.66m sale of items formerly owned by the famous engineer James Watt and his son James Watt Junior that had been carefully passed down through his family.
