Miniature

What Bonhams are billing as “one of the world’s greatest portrait miniature collections” will go on sale in their Bond Street rooms on April 22. The 175 English and Continental miniatures, which have been on loan to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery for the past three years, date from the 16th to the 19th century and are estimated to fetch in excess of £1m.

While Sotheby’s incorporated their best objects of vertu into their silver sale on November 20, Christie’s offered theirs in tandem with portrait miniatures in a 264-lot sale the following month on December 9. The vertu side of the sale performed particularly well, with hardly any failures, most of the 55 unsold lots coming from the miniatures.

The strong collecting base for miniatures has cushioned this market from the wider economic vagaries that have affected other more trade-dependent fields such as furniture and silver. Bonhams Bond Street (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) specialist Emma Rutherford reckoned around 80 per cent of entries sold privately in their 193-lot routine miniature and silhouettes sale back on July 1. “Our buyers tend to be retired and tend to have their money readily accessible,” she said.

Not such a pretty face, perhaps, but the artist was certainly worth a thousand dollars or more.

In the portrait miniature market the sitter is considered less important than the painter – but sometimes even a famous artist like Henry Bone, enamellist to the Prince Regent and the author of this miniature, right, can be superseded by their subject.

Back on April 9 and 10 Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) Bond Street rooms offered a double helping of portrait miniatures on consecutive days: a 165-lot single owner and a 133-lot mixed-vendor sale, both of which saw around three-quarters of their contents get away.

This portrait miniature of a 30-year-old lady by Nicholas Hilliard, dated 1582, set a new auction record for the artist at Sotheby’s Olympia rooms on June 6 when it sold to a private collector bidding on the phone against the room for £200,000 (plus premium).

This previously undiscovered miniature on ivory of Lincolnshire dignitary Charles De Laet Waldo-Sibthorp is expected to take up to £2000 when it is offered for sale on April 24 at the Lincoln rooms of Thomas Mawer & Sons.

PORTRAIT MINIATURES: A substantial selection of silhouettes and a collection of wax portraits boosted the content of a 311-lot middle ranking sale of portrait miniatures held by Bonhams on March 12.

PORTRAIT miniatures are one field that has been performing strongly in recent seasons, an area of the market where the private buyer is very much in evidence.

UK: INSET with a portrait miniature, this 1925 Golden Cockerel edition of Songs... by Robert Burns, illustrated with wood engravings by Mabel Annesley and bound in Cosway style in red morocco gilt by Bayntun Rivière, was sold at Bonhams (Buyer’s premium:15/10 per cent) at £1400 (Pirouages).

A MAJOR cataloguing project at the Museum of Cincinnati in Ohio has authenticated up to 15 very important and hitherto unrecorded portrait miniatures by the likes of Nicholas Hilliard.

Treasures To Hold: Irish and English Miniatures 1650-1850 from the National Gallery of Ireland Collection by Dr Paul Caffrey, published by the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. tel: 01 661 5133. email: artgall@eircom.net ISBN 090316275X £19.99.

UK: FEW silhouettes are as desirable as those portraits of military officers produced by John Buncombe, and few of those are as valuable as the example illustrated here, which was the highlight of a residual 17-lot group of silhouettes from the Christie Collection, consigned to Christie’s (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) South Kensington sale on March 14.

ELABORATE multi-figure conversation pieces are amongst the most sought-after classes of silhouette.

UK: TONY BANKS MP and former ministers Kenneth Baker and Peter Brooke were among those registering their interests at a sale of political commemoratives held by Special Auction Services on June 13 at the Courtyard Hotel, Padworth.

UK: A MAJOR loan exhibition of Dutch and Flemish cabinet pictures opens at Richard Green’s gallery at 33 New Bond Street, London W1 this week.