Market review: Asian art out-performs its estimates, while fine Antique bronzes foretell a return to lucrative form

Apollo, July, 2004 by Susan Moore

What a difference a name makes. As sales on both sides of the Atlantic in early June revealed, a good provenance works wonders in focussing a collector's eye. London's Asian art sales, the strongest for a number of years, offered three single-owner collections. On 9 June Sotheby's presented a select group of 100 Chinese and Korean ceramics from the private Toguri Museum of Art in Tokyo. The pieces came with punchy estimates but still succeeded in selling well over them, realising 5.5m [pounds sterling], with ninety-one per cent sold by value. The top lot here was a rare and dramatic black and white 'Cizhou' peony baluster vase of the Northern Song dynasty which sold to a Taiwanese dealer for a mighty 677,600 [pounds sterling] despite the fact that it had previously been broken into more than thirty pieces. A rare blue and white 'Dragon' jar, mark and period of Jiajing, similarly soared over estimate and sold for 319,200 [pounds sterling], even though its cover did not belong to it. Such is the demand for good quality, provenanced Chinese ceramics that even imperfect pieces are now highly sought after. Gone are the days, it seems, when any damage would render a piece worth a tenth of the price of a perfect example.

More striking still was the enormous success of the Chinese monochrome porcelains from the E.T. Hall collection, the best sixty or so pieces of which had already been sold at Sotheby's in Hong Kong four years ago. The 7 June sale, a triumph of Christie's marketing machine, had these highly decorative pieces contested by buyers some of whom had never bought Chinese works of art before. Revealingly, the lion's share of the biggest prices were paid by private European bidders. Some eighty-seven per cent was sold by lot and ninety-four per cent sold by value, the whole totalling 2.4m [pounds sterling]. A Kangxi clair-de-tune-glazed Zhi shaped vase was the top lot here, estimated at 25,000 [pounds sterling]-35,000 [pounds sterling] and selling for 128,450 [pounds sterling]; it was certainly not alone in quadrupling expectations. Had these pieces comes to auction individually, they would never have realised such prices.

For the cognoscenti, the names of Belgian collectors Adolphe and Suzanne Stoclet are indeed legendary, and their collection of Japanese prints, illustrated books and paintings--one of the greatest remaining in private hands--included a significant number of unrecorded and rare prints or the 'primitive' period, some in astonishing near-pristine condition. The surimono or illustrated books, in particular, were exceptional. At Sotheby's on the 9 June, Utamaro's Gifts of the ebb tide, one of the technical masterpieces of Japanese woodblock printing, was represented by a superb copy of the first edition, lavishly embossed with metallic pigments, gold dust, leaf and paint, and with mica on some of the shells to simulate sand. That sold for a record 63,600 [pounds sterling]. Only the artist's print of Three beauties of Yoshiwara fetched more, going to a US dealer for 79,200 [pounds sterling]. The 495-lot collection, which was only sixty-seven per cent sold by lot, still exceeded expectations, realising just under 1.5m [pounds sterling]--and one suspects prices would have been even higher if more Japanese had been in a position to buy. No doubt the Stoclet name helped the less illustrious prints, which wore not always in the first state.

Even individual pieces now bask in the reflected glory of an eminent collector's name--the addition of such prefixes is becoming an increasingly common, but no less irritating, feature of auction-house catalogues. On the 9 June, for instance, Sotheby's offered what they described as the legendary Behrens wrestlers. This much exhibited, exceptionally large (at 11.5 cm high) and powerfully rendered wooden group--it is a netsuke or is it an okimono?--signed by Hokkyo Shima Sessai, was last seen at auction when it was sold from the W.L. Behrens collection in 1913. The star lot of Sotheby's Japanese and Korean sale on 9 June, it sold on target for a substantial 117,600 [pounds sterling]. The same auction-house also presented on the same day the Somerset De Chair jade water buffalo, a massive recumbent beast which belonged to a connoisseur whose passion for jade buffalos, it was said, was trumped only by the Emperor Qianlong. A Hong Kong collector snapped it up for 532,000 [pounds sterling], just above its high estimate.

Western decorative arts and sculpture also strong

As for the George II Chinoiserie giltwood overmantel mirror by sold by Christie's New York on 3 June, it had it all. Not only is it a rococo tour-de-force topped with a pagoda, pagod and tinkling bells and made by the leading cabinet-makers William and John Linnell, but better yet the mirror was conceived as the centrepiece of the celebrated Chinese bedroom at Badminton House, Gloucestershire, commissioned by the fourth Duke of Beaufort. Once the property of English dukes, it was sold on 3 June from the estate of the American heiress Doris Duke. Estimated at $250,000-$400,000, few could have been surprised to see it fetch over $1.5m (850,000 [pounds sterling]). The whole sale totalled $12m (6.5m [pounds sterling]).