Robert Thompson - Mouseman

Wife describes how collector husband Chris Hancock’s latest artworks had to fight for space in a family home

These two oak boarded chests, made to similar techniques four centuries apart, were offered for sale recently.

Re: your article in ATG No 2538 (A Trio of Arts & Crafts designers in focus) including a Mouseman oak blanket chest sold at Sheffield Auction Gallery for £12,000 hammer, which features the mouse carved in recess rather than profile.

Ecclesiastical commissions are integral to the Mouseman story – it was the friendship between Father Paul Neville and Robert Thompson that led to the work at Ampleforth College – but in commercial terms these can be relatively difficult pieces.

Smaller decorative pieces by Robert ‘Mouseman’ Thompson (1876-1955) continue to excel in the saleroom.

Morphets (20% buyer’s premium) of Harrogate sold a Mouseman bureau for a tub-thumping £36,000 on April 15.

The highlight of a £75,000, 30-lot private collection of Robert Thompson oak carvings sold by Tennants was an anthropomorphic figure of The Mouseman of Kilburn.

Dunhill Aquarium table lighters painted by Margaret Bennett and husband Alan in the 1950s-60s remain popular among collectors in these non-smoking days.

The highlight of a private collection of Robert Thompson oak carvings to be offered by Tennants on March 6 is this curious anthropomorphic figure of the ‘Mouseman of Kilburn’.

Furniture by Robert ‘Mouseman' Thompson and more recent productions from the Kilburn workshop attracted the usual enthusiasm at Tennants (20% buyer’s premium).

Classic Robert Thompson products from family collections underline current keen demand.

This set of table and chairs by the ever-popular Mouseman had been bought from the Kilburn workshops in the 1970s by the vendor’s parents.

A rare pair of bookends by Robert ‘Mouseman’ Thompson attracted huge interest and a remarkable £10,000 winning bid at Lawrences of Crewkerne.

The demand for 1960s Pulcini glass birds made by Alessandro Pianon (1931-64) for the Venetian company Vistosi has spiked in recent months.

More homely than the material being produced in Scandinavia and France, the adzed oak furniture first made by Robert ‘Mouseman’ Thompson in the 1920s-30s was, nevertheless, a distinctive genre.

Never out of fashion, the best furniture by Robert Thompson is going through one of its periodic surges – as evident at Wilkinson’s Doncaster rooms last month (ATG No 2369) and at Sworders of Stansted Mountfichet (ATG No 2363) in October.