Arts
The taste of the time
Huon Mallalieu
One of the numerous lots which raised eyebrows as well as bids at Mentmore was an album of brown wash, drawings by Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Batty, FRS, which went to a German buyer for £40,000. For most people, indeed, for most people involved in the art market, Batty's is not a name to conjure with. Ile was a Grenadier Guardsman who fought in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo, where he was wounded in the hip. Like 'his father, Dr Robert Batty, and his sister, he was an amateur artist, and he employed his extensive periods of leave in travelling about Europe producing drawings which were later worked up for publication as handsome topographical books. The Cataloguers at Mentmore were caught on the hop by the price, having issued a pre-sale estimate of between £2,000 and £4,000, but their colleagues In the boa department would not have been so surprised, since Batty's Hanoverian, Saxon and Danish Scenery (1829), for Which these were the original drawings, has been an expensive item for some time. A second volume of Batty drawings, for his Scenery of the Rhine, Belgium and Holland (1826), went to an English book dealer at £23,000, and two volumes of prints after them made £3,500. These prices, although high, were in fact part of a theme of the picture market for some years past, buying for nationalist as well as artistic reasons. Obviously there has always been a ready sale for works of local topography within the locality. What has been new is the willingness of both dealers and collectors to comb foreign sales and shops to procure items carried away by souvenir hunters and collectors in past centuries, and to pay high prices to recover them. This is not just a case of 'new'
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tries such as Australia, South Africa, the United States and certain South American and Middle Eastern states endeavouring to acquire a pictorial history, but also of the emergence of new classes of picture buyers in countries such as Germany, Switzerland and Italy. The strength of nationalistic buying can be a pointer to the political Or economic strength of a country.
Two examples of this seem to have emerged in recent months. Over the last few years the South Africans have been an easy touch for anyone with a South African view or subject, however primitive, or even crude, to sell. Views of Cape Town and Table Mountain by passing seamen have been snapped up with alacrity. However, Perhaps due to fears within the laager as to the future, this appears to be the case no longer. What the South African picture buyer requires now is safe works with a wider appeal, such as Old Masters and European paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On the other hand, whatever one's opinions as to methods and indeed results, both Brazil and Chile are at present achieving a measure of stability and, among certain classes, a distinct measure of prosperity. Brazilians have been buying pictures of local scenes for some years. Chilean buyers seem to have made their presence felt in London for the first time at the end of May, when a watercolour, in need of cleaning, showing the celebration of Liberation Day in Santiago in about 1840 sold for £9,000, the highest price in a sale of works 'of Topographical Interest', The theme of safety is repeated in English buying, as well it might be. From all sides one hears that nineteenth-century and Victorian paintings are increasing in value, and that the twentieth-century painters most in favour are those, like Russell Flint and Montague Dawson, whose styles and subject matter are taken directly from the less inspired practitioners of a hundred years ago. These are men whose appeal and technical brilliance are obvious, and whose intrinsic artistic merit is less so: can one really justify the bracketing in price of even the best of Flint's naked ladies with even a mediocre Turner or Girtin?
Safety first, also, in the Old Master and Contemporary fields. For some time attractive seventeenth-century still lifes have been underpriced. Now they, and works by such eighteenth-century artists as the followers of Boucher, are eagerly sought after. It is often the case that the pictures most in demand in times of economic uncertainty are those which are most easy to live with. In the 1920s it was Morland and English portraits, now it is still life and Victorian genre paintings. Fashions in modern picture buying are also governed by safety, although in rather a different way. Taste, here, is largely created by a small number of people in a small number of artistic centres which include New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Rome and Diisseldorf. Unless an artist is accepted by these people as being of value, he cannot hope to see his pictures making the highest prices. Since the second world war this has led many painters throughout the world to derive their styles and ideas from currently fashionable American models, which have not often been particularly inspired in the first place. For this reason, if for no other, the exhibition being held by the Brotherhood of Ruralists at the Festival Gallery, Bath, until 25 June, and later in the year at Edinburgh, Doncaster and Southampton, is one that should be seen by anyone concerned with the future direction of modern painting. The Brotherhood, Anne and Graham Arnold, Peter Blake,'Jann Haworth, Annie and Graham Ovendon and David Inshaw, stand for the traditions of English art which they feel have been neglected for too long. There are many influences of the past to be seen in their work, but they are not merely derivative. Their achievement is to blend past and present in a way which is rarely attempted by their contemporaries, and which has an appeal which reaches far beyond the gilded circles of contemporary art buying.
One other factor should always be kept in mind when interpreting the results of more conventionally important Impressionist and modern sales, as with important Old Masters. At its simplest, there are buyers and sellers. At this level one is dealing with very large sums of money, and a great deal depends upon the taste of the individual dealers and collectors involved. Thus headlines such as 'Sale that shook the Art World', when a high percentage has been bought in, can be misleading. A case in point is Christie's opening sale in New York where a large proportion of the more important lots failed to sell — although a number of them were in fact sold after the sale. It would be most unwise to draw any general conclusions from the fluctuations of this area of the market.
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