Casting the spotlight on the Lyon auction trade

Highest bid was a quadruple-estimate Fr600,000 (£56,000) for Carlo Ferrari’s 1845 Market Square in Verona, 4ft 6in x 3ft 8in (1.36 x 1.12m) at Chenu-Scrive on June 11-14. Another good price here was Fr230,000 (£21,500) for a square Brazilian rosewood games table in by André Sornay, one of Lyon’s foremost exponents of Art Deco.

Chenu-Scrive are one of three auction firms who share the Hôtel des Ventes de Lyon Presqu’île, the city’s historic central auction-house. It’s a sort of old-fashioned Drouot with wooden floors and every square inch pressed into service: the main ground-floor saleroom is the original courtyard with a glass roof.

The Presqu’île remained Lyon’s sole auction venue until 1976, when the city’s auctioneer moved to new premises in the adjoining town of Villeurbanne. A major fire there in the mid-’80s prompted auctioneers to scatter; some sought individual premises, some moved back to the Presqu'île, which Chenu-Scrive now share with André Dumas and Chaussin-Bremens-Guillaumot, who sold a Nu Orange Assis, 2ft 8in x 2ft 2in (80 x 65cm), by local 20th century artist Jean Puy for Fr238,000 (£22,200) on May 17. The city centre venue ensures these firms a traditional clientele and trade involvement is relatively restrained. That’s less the case with the city’s other auctioneers who, after the Villeurbanne fire, opted for radical change.

Flagbearer for Lyon’s new generation is Jean-Claude Anaf, who hails from Grenoble and has ambivalent feelings towards his adopted city. He says the Lyonnais are more vendors than buyers, even though the region is “extremely rich”. Serious clients, he admits, look to Paris.

Even so, Anaf has one of the swankiest auction houses in France: the converted Gare des Brotteaux, the main station on the Paris-Lyon rail-line until the nearby Part-Dieu station was built for the new TGV trains in 1981. Gare des Brotteaux is a contemporary and stylistic cousin of the Gare – now Musée – d’Orsay in Paris. Anaf moved in in 1989 and now posts sales of over £20m per year, claiming to have “turned Lyon into the second auction city in France”.

Foreign trade interest at Anaf’s sales centres on modern pictures, Old Masters and furniture; he claims that American clients are “very difficult, more so than the English”. Anaf likes to stage his main sales just before the summer and autumn Temps Fort in Paris, “otherwise we’d be lost in the crowd”. His varied sale on June 10 yielded a top price of Fr400,000 (£37,400) for a pair of “foreign” rectangular ormolu-mounted console tables with marble marquetry tops (c.1800). The sum of Fr190,000 (£17,800) rewarded Les Orientales (1894) by Emile Bernard, 2ft 9in x 3ft 7in (85cm x 1.1m); and Fr110,000 (£10,300) went to a Charles X maplewood bedroom suite comprising wardrobe, bed, bedside table and chest of drawers.

Another firm who moved into their own spacious premises (in a former mattress factory) after the Villeurbanne fire were Conan-Auclair. Paintings and furniture regularly come under their gavel but Christophe Bellevue, who recently joined Loïc Conan and Marie-France Auclair as an associate, acknowledges that car sales are also very important to the firm, and he is keen to develop wine sales. Interestingly, he expects a rush of cash payments (allowed by French law for bids of up to Fr20,000) when the euro comes in at the start of next year, as the French seek to offload all the coppers they’ve been stashing under their… mattresses, out of the taxman’s eye.

Alain Milliarède also opted for a spacious new venue on the outskirts of Lyon a decade ago – in a converted farmstead that had previously served as a lemonade factory and silk factory. Easy access and free onsite parking were key reasons for his choice, but Milliarède admits that Lyonnais seem reluctant to make the short trip out from the city centre – even though he says the surrounding Vaise district is “up and coming”. Lyon is a city of “brocanteurs”, he snorts; he claims the city’s main antiques street, Rue Auguste-Lecomte, has only one dealer worth the name.

Milliarède has been a commissaire-priseur since 1952 and is the doyen of regional auctioneers, although he now operates in tandem with his daughters Aline and Madeleine. Something of a traditionalist, he is wary of catalogue sales – a recipe for litigation, he feels – so it’s not surprising that frontline prices under his gavel are a rare occurrence, although that didn’t stop him earning Fr1m from a New York dealer for a small cupboard by Dubois.

Nothing of that ilk cropped up at the Milliarède sale on June 16, when an English piano made by Solin & Broadwood (London 1802) was among the highlights on Fr5200 (£490).