The article in ATG no. 2533 about the Byzantine ring from the Guilhou collection.
The entire collection of some 2000 rings took Sotheby’s four days to sell in 1937 and realised a higher than expected total of £15,000.
The catalogue was the work of Peter Wilson, later to be the company’s charismatic chairman.
Twenty five years after the auction, his Guilhou catalogue was still often paraded as the benchmark that us junior cataloguers were encouraged to surpass, most often by Peter Wilson himself.
Daniel Fearon
New Malden, Surrey
