Weighed down by silver
Susan Moore
It is feast or famine in the salerooms these days. We may be well into the autumn auction season, but most days the big London rooms have the air of the banquet after the guests have left. And then, just when one despairs of seeing any works of art in these cavernous galleries ever again, in they flood. Hundreds and thousands of them. Last week, for instance, Sotheby's masterminded the dispersal of the massive Beck Collection of German Expressionist, Modern and Tribal art — over 400 lots even without the prints. Later this month, the trestle tables at Christie's will be groaning under the weight of royal Prussian silver, porcelain and glass — not least because virtually all of the silver, over 12,000 individual pieces of it, is solid rather than plate. Porcelain plates come by the stack and with the serried ranks of table glass account for another 5,000 or so items. The salerooms have not seen this kind of scale of domestic wares since the great shipwreck cargoes of Chinese porcelain that began to resurface in the 1980s.
The romance of those shipwreck sales gripped the public imagination in a way that few auctions have ever done. But, as anyone will tell you who has tried to resell anything from those watery hoards, the individual porcelains, most of them workaday pieces produced by the thousands, just could not sustain their initial allure. Odds are, however, that the trophy hunting at the Hohenzollern sale on 31 October and 1 November will be a safer bet than treasure hunting. For all these items relate to particular individuals, most of them bearing their crests and monograms — engraved, etched. painted or gilded.
Arguably, both the earliest and the finest are the delectable silver dish and dish-covers with the mark of the court silversmith Christian Lieberkuhn the Younger which were made for Frederick the Great around 1747, probably for his beloved palace of Sanssouci. Each cover is ornamented with the leaves and fruit of the vine, the handles formed as a curving branch. The sole complete dish and cover comes with an estimate of £10,000415,000; the covers alone are expected to fetch half that. Agreeably simple quatrefoil-shaped 20 oz dinner plates, meanwhile, offered in sets of 12, six or as singletons, are estimated at just 11,000 apiece. Someone could even snaffle the set of eight table-spoons engraved with the monogram of the king's wife, Elizabeth Christine, for the estimated £2004300.
What is rarely known is from which royal palace the pieces came. No inventories survive, and when Kaiser Wilhelm was obliged to abdicate the throne in 1918, a special train with 59 carriages was filled with effects from the eight royal palaces in and around Berlin. After 1945, works of art from his home Huis Doom in the Netherlands were integrated into the existing collection at Burg Hohenzollern, the only family estate which happened to be in what became West Germany. No doubt the Kaiser's dramatic flight into exile accounts for some of the anomalies in the collection: the mid-19thcentury rococo-pattern silver table service, for instance, comprises some 2,000 table forks but a mere 1,500 table knives, 400 table-spoons and 80 dessert-spoons. Forks feature prominently in this sale.
Nothing is being sold from the castle's Schatzkammer and everything on offer here is duplicated either in the family or state collections; moreover, even after this purging of the princely storerooms at Burg Hohenzollern — offered for sale to settle the estate of the late Crown Prince Wilhelm von Preussen — the Hohenzollerns will retain around a third of their silver, porcelain and glass. Quite enough to put on a decent show at dinner.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of this sale, however, is the restraint and appealing simplicity of so many of the pieces, be it silver plate and flatware or the household porcelain produced by the Berlin Royal Porcelain Factory founded by Frederick in 1763 (striking, though less surprising, is how so much of the silver is in the English manner). This is one of those representative, something-for-everyone sales, with everything from florid silver-gilt by way of 1904 toast tongs, enamelled silver matchbox-sleeves from the Kaiser's yacht to imperial chamberpots. But while estimates may be well below the price for their contemporary equivalents, let's be realistic about the likelihood of even the least appealing trifles fetching just a few hundred pounds.
Those who prefer their possessions to scream their royal provenance might divert their gaze on the 30th to Sotheby's. Here is the grandest of Flemish tortoiseshell, brass and inlaid cabinets on stands, ornamented with trophies and depicting the military victories of Philip V of Spain, and the whole extraordinary assemblage crowned by the king's gilded coat of arms. This extravagant tour-de-force (estimate £300,0(J0–£500,000) is the highlight of a new Art of Flanders sale featuring not only furniture but sculpture, tapestries and other works of art. Themed and single-owner sales dot the auction calendar for the next few weeks among them auctions of 20th-century Italian art, a collection of pieces designed by C.R. Macintosh and other architects (Christie's), plus the lion's share of the intriguing, motley contents of the Charterhouse school museum (Sotheby's).
As for whether you can have too much or too little of a good thing (the flaw of the generally successful £14 million Beck sale was that there was not enough of a good thing), perhaps the last word belongs to the affable Lord Hindlip, who is retiring as chairman of Christie's International at the end of the year. When I came into this business 40 years ago, there were 96 staff and an annual turnover of £3.5 million,' he explains in his King Street eyrie, high above his first billet on the Front Counter. 'We didn't seem to have anything to sell and yet there were sales every single day. Now we never seem to have any sales at all, but there is a staff of 2,000 and a turnover of £1.25 billion.'
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