When to buy a Leonardo Da Vinci at Christie's (try 1776) by Imogen Robertson

Christie's Auction Room (From the original drawing by Rowlandson)

On 15th November 2017 Salvator Mundi, (very probably) by Leonardo Da Vinci sold at auction at Christie’s New York for $450.3 million. You may have read one of the reports about its rediscovery, restoration and controversial sale and resales - if not take a look at this article in the Guardian, it includes a nifty slider so you can see the effects of that restoration - you may also have picked up on the fact it was bought from an estate sale (pre-restoration) in 2005 for ten thousand dollars, and felt a deep twinge of sympathy for whoever sold it then.

Salvator Mundi - Leonardo Da Vinci (1500)

If that bothers you, my story today might break your heart. Robert Foulis (b.1707) and his brother Andrew were printers to the University of Glasgow and earned a reputation for the accuracy of their printing of Greek texts, and showed considerable critical and commercial sense in their choice of modern authors. In the 1750s they set up an Academy of Fine Art in Glasgow, and made their art collection available to the students who studied there, a collection enhanced with further large purchases of art in 1772. The Academy however seemed to be a terrible financial strain and closed its doors after Andrew died in 1775. 

Early the following year Robert went to London, apparently to sell the pictures. He was advised against doing so by none other than Mr James Christie who apparently told him that the market was glutted with similar paintings. According to the snappily entitled Robert & Andrew Foulis and the Glasgow Press : with some account of the Glasgow Academy of the Fine Arts by David Murray, after expenses Foulis returned to Glasgow with just fifteen shillings of profit and died very shortly afterwards (2 June 1776). 

James Christie
From a print by R. Dighton(in  Memorials of CHRISTIE’S: 
A Record of Art Sales from 1766 to 1896

By William Roberts)

Now if Foulis had been trying to sell just one Da Vinci, that would put the pain of the person who sold Salvator Mundi in 2005 into some sort of perspective, but Foulis wasn’t just selling one painting, oh no. The collection he took to London included (according to his three volume catalogue)  SIX works by Leonardo Da Vinci works, as well as numbers of works by Raphael, Titian and Rubens. 

Now it’s true he wasn’t the only one with a stack of Old Masters on hand in 1776. James Christie had in one sale sold pictures by all those artists the previous April, and did so again in March of 1776. In the same issue of the Public Advertiser in which Christie advertised the 1776 sale, Messers Langford in Covent Garden are alerting readers to their own auction which includes Rubens, Rembrandt, Carracci and Titian and Mr Walsh has a selection of Poussin and Corregio up for auction if you aren’t Old Mastered out.

Daily Advertiser (London, England), Monday, March 20, 1775 

Public Advertiser (London, England), Friday, March 1, 1776

Public Advertiser (London, England), Friday, March 1, 1776

Public Advertiser (London, England), Friday, March 1, 1776

But… As we all know only too well the closer you look into history the murkier it all gets. I’m pretty sure Foulis didn’t sell his pictures at all. 

Now, it may be that he intended to do so, and heeded Christie’s advice to wait, or it may be his original intention was to make money out of his collection in another way. Here is the advertisement Foulis ran (with minor variations) from 31 January to 26 May 1776. 

Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Wednesday, January 31, 1776

There is no mention of any sale here. Instead he is quite explicitly exhibiting his pictures and charging a shilling a time, and also trying to sell his three volume catalogue of the collection. 

It’s true that auctioneers often exhibited works for a few days before a sale, but I can’t see any example where they did so for weeks. Langford charged people a shilling to come and see what he was selling from 1 March 1776, but he probably wouldn’t have had room to do so before then, giving he had two other old master sales in February. 

For anyone who has tried to tempt Londoners to an event, that fifteen shillings profit looks pretty reasonable now. There is no doubt that Foulis was devastated by the failure of his exhibition. His printer gives a rather harrowing description of him returning home to Glasgow, exhausted and deeply disappointed. 

But his paintings were sold in 1776, only it was in December almost six months after Robert died and by… yes, James Christie himself. Here is the notice:

Public Advertiser (London, England), Monday, December 2, 1776

So why were they sold at this point? The new season has begun, but it's only a couple of weeks old, so it's still early for the eighteenth century oligarchs to have gathered, I’d have thought. Possibly Robert’s death had made his family’s severe financial problems acute and they had to sell as quickly as they could. 

The sale realised £381 8s 6d. It’s tempting to insert a snarky remark about Christies having got a lot better at selling Da Vinci’s since then, but something else must have been going on too as Christie’s sale of M. Le Brun’s pictures in 1775 netted £2,142 and Sir George Colebroke’s collection sold for £4,385 17 shillings. 

Perhaps Christie knew the market was glutted, because he’d glutted it himself.

It is also possible that Foulis’ paintings were being looked at with a sceptical eye. Given that there are under twenty paintings universally accepted as by Leonardo known today, it does seem a little dubious that so many drifted through the London art market at this time. If anyone wants to take advantage of this link to the Foulis catalogue, and match his descriptions to a particular painting, I’d be fascinated to find learn more. I'd also love to know what happened to the pictures after the sale.

Looking at various calculators of relative value, that £381 from the sale could be worth anything between forty thousand pounds and four million today. Even if we take the latter figure, that’s still a hundredth of what someone just paid for one rather beaten up Da Vinci.

So next time you timeslip into the 18th century you know where to go for a bargain.

www.imogenrobertson.com 

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE (FITZWILLIAM) MUSEUM by Adèle Geras

This is the faccade of a part of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Almost the first thing I did when we moved to this city in 2010 was to join the Friends of the Fitzwilliam. The museum is known as 'a collection of collections' and anyone who's ever been there will know that it's a huge depository of all things interesting and beautiful.

The Museum puts on very good  exhibitions. TREASURED POSSESSIONS was recently a great favourite with all who visited and I've loved Edmund de Waal ceramics, water colours, art from China and Japan and many, many other shows. 

The Friends are a wonderful organisation. I'm told that the Fitzwilliam was the first museum to have such a group attached to it and that it was founded in 1909. I had a reason for joining quite separate from supporting my local museum.  The Friends regularly take trips to great stately homes and other interesting places and because I don't drive, I'm always happy to join these outings. I've seen some glorious places over the last five years.

But as well as jaunts and outings, the Fitz does a great job of putting on workshops for the general public, including children and also lays on Study mornings for the Friends from time to time. I couldn't resist the poster advertising the Flowers and Fans study morning in June and it turned out to be a most enjoyable and fascinating occasion.

First things first: coffee and refreshments in the Meeting Room, provided by the Friends' committee. Here are two photos, which don't show the lively chat and friendly faces of the people attending.

On the morning we were there, the Museum had taken delivery of a boxes and boxes of 18th and 19th century fans, sent from Christie's the auction house. We weren't allowed to take photos of those because they were so new that they hadn't even been 'checked in' so to speak. It was a privilege to hear Vicky, Eleanor and Amy telling us about them and the photos you see of fans here are from the permanent collection, taken later on after the Study Morning was over. I've put them in  mainly as decoration to break up the text,  and didn't even take down details of their provenance.

I've adored fans from a very early age. I can remember folding pieces of paper into a kind of concertina to make a rudimentary fan of my own, but real fans, fans made of ivory or feathers or silk painted with flowers were a part of my childhood. My mother liked fans and had a few which I was allowed to play with when I dressed up. I suspect that the ones I was enjoying were past their best.

Fans were at their most fashionable during the 18th century. French Huguenot fan makers came over to London and flourished there. Ladies in England took to them with great gusto and there was a huge variety of patterns and pictures to choose from. The Language of Fans is well known. Joseph Addison,  founder of the Spectator magazine, wrote "Women are armed with fans as men with swords and sometimes do more execution with them." 

There was a huge variety of decorations available to the fan designer. Flowers, Chinoiserie, figures from mythology: anything that could be depicted on a fan was depicted. Some of the ornamentation was quite risqué. One that had been unpacked on the morning we were there was printed all over with verses.  It was called The Ladies' Bill of Fare and described the various men you could hope to snare. I wrote down one  of the quatrains:

"To plague and please all womankind
Here's gallants sure aplenty.
Chuse then a beau to suit your mind
Or change till one content ye!"

After the fans, we went through the Museum and into one of the back rooms; the kind of place which is so fascinating to be in that the things you're looking at are only part of the fun. Again, we weren't allowed to photograph anything, but imagine a room with many windows and rows and rows of display drawers and books and files, which have to be taken out in order to be viewed. We were looking at the flower paintings in the collection and all I have in my notebook now is the names of the artists. Some, like Redouté are well-known and many more are less famous: Jean Baptiste Pillement, Maria Sybilla Merian,  Antoine de Pinet, Bosschaert, Mary Moser and many others.  Henry Broughton, Lord Fairhaven was an important collector of flower drawings and paintings and his collection is here in  the Fitzwilliam. Here is a painting (not in the Fitzwilliam)  by Bosschaert: 

The Cambridge Botanic Gardens are just up the road from the Fitzwilliam and those are full of beautiful plants and flowers. Here was an echo of  the natural world.  In this room we found a garden on paper, held in albums so that the colour of each bloom is preserved in the best possible conditions.  Flower painting was an art that very many young ladies took up as a hobby and this is one reason why there are so many accomplished paintings of this kind.


The Fitzwilliam Museum is a real treasure house and I do urge anyone who is within easy reach of Cambridge to come and visit. You are sure to find a collection among the collections which will suit you.  There really is something for everyone within its walls.  It's shut on Mondays but any other day it makes a terrific place to visit. And though you won't get Friends' brownies when you visit, the Café  and shop are both superb.

I had a notebook with me that day and I'm going to end with a quotation I wrote down carelessly without recording the name of the person who wrote it.  I don't know exactly why I love this so much, but I do, so these are the words I will leave you with. 
"La couleur bleu n'existe que dans la tête du peintre." (The colour blue only exists in the painter's head.)