Occupied for many years by Miss Jeanne Courtauld, who has recently moved to a nursing home, the Jacobean house contained furniture and chattels acquired during the 1920s by Jeanne’s father Major Jack Courtauld, brother of Courtauld Institute founder Samuel. Like his brother, Major Jack was a keen collector with a good eye and had bought his antiques from a selection of top London dealers.
Happily for Stride’s, the London houses felt the sale wasn’t enough of a money-spinner for them to get involved. The sale stayed on the premises and although, by their own admission, Stride’s may not have the marketing machines available to Sotheby’s or Christie’s, just about all the major dealers from London and the South East made the trip to Pulborough to mingle with serious private buyers and local residents keen for a nose around the ‘big house’.
Provenance always adds a premium at house sales but the £190,000 taken by a pair of 18th century Continental oval wall mirrors stunned auctioneer Mark Hewitt.
On the first day of the view the pair, which had boulle-style red and gilt verre eglomisé borders, gilt rims and scroll surmounts, were hanging on the wall but following the advice of a respected dealer, they were removed and laid on top of the dining table where they continued to catch every dealer’s eye.
There were varying opinions about the 2ft 9in (85cm) tall mirrors’ country of origin and even if they were a pair. Mark Hewitt had a suspicion the dealer who dropped out at the £50,000 mark felt they were English but the boulle design, suggested Continental Europe. Quite a few other pieces in the house were Portuguese but the auctioneers settled on France for the mirrors.
Condition was pretty good considering their probable early 18th century date. The gilding needed some attention and the mirrors would at some stage have had girandole candle sconce insets but the plates were original and there were just two cracks to the borders.
Bidding opened at the top estimate £10,000 and rose rapidly to £50,000 where four telephone bidders, two from London and two from New York, entered the arena with the London buyer posting the winning £190,000 bid. This was by some considerable way the highest price Stride’s have ever achieved, beating their previous record of £98,000 for L.S. Lowry’s Old Houses in February 2001.
When Major Courtauld bought an early 18th century walnut settee back in the 1920s, there had been some suggestion that it was illustrated in Percy Macquoid’s seminal 1905 tome The History of English Furniture: Age of Walnut 1660-1720.
Although this was found not to be the case, the quality of the settee was beyond question. With bird-head terminals to the arms and claw and ball feet, the settee had been used during numerous parish council meetings held in Cooke’s House over the past 30 years where one of the members was a London dealer – the man who made the winning bid of £36,000 against an estimate of £7000-10,000.
When the Courtauld family moved to the seven-bedroomed Cooke’s House after their Petworth mansion Burton Park was requisitioned during the Second World War, Jeanne Courtauld remarked that the impressive stone house with its Gertrude Jekyll designed garden “felt like a bungalow”. Clearly the eight bidders willing to offer the asking price of £3m at its recent sale didn’t agree with her.
One of the unsuccessful would-be owners of the house arrived at the sale from the South West and left with a set of eight Dutch marquetry dining chairs. Each chair was in good order and had floral vase splats, floral tapestry seats and cabriole legs with shell knees. Carrying hopes of up to £10,000, they took £14,000.
Secrétaires à abattant tend not to be easy sellers, hence the low £2000-3000 estimate on a walnut example with cushion drawers above a deep fall front enclosing a fitted interior with feather-banded drawers. To Mark Hewitt’s surprise, it attracted lots of interest despite its replacement feet and sold to a London dealer with a holiday cottage near Petworth at £11,000.
Another London dealer with a country home in the surrounding area snapped up a walnut hanging corner cabinet. In good order, the 2ft 1in (63cm) high cabinet had a mirror door with an engraved coronet and pillar sides.
Despite its condition, Mark Hewitt didn’t think the cabinet would be a particularly strong seller and pitched it low at £1750-2000.
But the Kensington Church Street dealer was determined to have it and went to £5800 to beat off a Wiltshire trade rival.
A pair of 18th century painted dummy boards may both have depicted standing ladies but Mr Hewitt was certain they were a pair.
Single dummy boards turn up frequently at auction but pairs do not and this duet, standing 3ft 4in (1.02m) and 3ft 5in (1.05m) high, were in good condition.Estimated up to £3000, they sold to a Mount Street dealer at £4600.
An 18th century standing corner cupboard with oval inlaid doors may have looked like walnut but the auctioneers were certain it was burr elm. The good colour and obvious quality saw it taken at an over-estimate £4200 by a mid-Sussex dealer.
Top seller among a small selection of jewellery was a Cartier Art Deco coral ring carved as a crouching temple dog. The general consensus among male viewers was that it was wonderful. The women, on the other hand, weren’t quite so complimentary.
Certainly the ring was very chunky and therefore rather impractical but as a rare thing by renowned makers, it sold over the phone at £7500.
A large proportion of the ceramics on offer were Chinese armorials, with the best money taken by a 14in (35cm) oval soup tureen.
Made for the Pierson family and bearing their crest of three suns, the tureen was also decorated with painted panels of Chinese ships.
There were condition issues due to quite a considerable crack but the enamelling was fine and it was an attractive looking thing. Estimated at £4000-6000, it sold to a London specialist dealer on the bottom
estimate.
Stride’s, Chichester, July 7
Number of lots: 509
Number of lots sold: 503
Sale total: £500,000+
Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent
Room for provincial firms at country house sales in absence of London
Taking it in their Stride’s... a £500,000 dispersal on the premises of Courtauld home: AFTER months, if not years, of a scarcity of on-the-premises house sales, this summer has seen the genuine article come the way of a number of provincial auctioneers, the latest being the sale of the contents of Cooke’s House in West Burton, near Pulborough, West Sussex held by Chichester auctioneers Stride’s.
