At London’s Masterpiece Art Fair, Elegance Rules Supreme

Imperial porcelain, a Georgian chandelier, a fallen angel, and 30-million-year-old rock art are among the treasures. 

A couple of weeks ago, I confided to you my hope never to cover another virtual art fair. With the COVID mass hysteria abating, I crave communal events like theater, opera, and especially art fairs. There, connoisseur dealers, art lovers, and great art mix a liberating cocktail of aesthetics rather than booze. I’ve never covered the Masterpiece art fair, though. It’s London-based and a peer in quality to the great TEFAF fair in Maastricht, which I’ve written about many times. It’s running online until June 29th, so one more . . .

A fair’s not just a fair. They’re all different, in works, obviously, but also in philosophy. Masterpiece has, like Maastricht, the top dealers and a robust vetting process. Craftsmanship, good condition, and piquant design are everywhere and a passion at both fairs. It’s different, though, and refreshing, in that it promotes crosscurrent collecting. At Maastricht, for example, prints and drawings, Old Master paintings, ancient art, Asian art, and jewelry have their own areas, or regions, since the fair is like a small city in size. It’s not segregated in fact, but it does promote focused shopping by specialist buyers sticking to specialist dealers.

Masterpiece encourages eclectic collecting and collectors, with specialties mixed, so it’s easy to do some serious aesthetic gravitation. This is what even many established collectors want these days.

I love the Maastricht fair but, simple country soul that I am, it’s exotic. The crowd is very rich, on the old side, and, overall, seems intensely niche-oriented. Masterpiece’s brand aims at younger people who either like variety by nature or are starting to collect and develop taste and connoisseurship.

The Maastricht fair also caters to Europeans, not exclusively since the big bucks tend to be American, but Maastricht itself is in the middle of Europe. Asian buyers are now big, too, since there’s so much money there. Still, there are lots of rich German, Italian, French, and especially Dutch collectors and art at Maastricht.

When Masterpiece started in 2010, it filled a gap. For decades, the best London art fair, for quality and elegance, was the Grosvenor House fair, held at the Park Lane hotel built on the site of the Duke of Westminster’s palace. In 2009, the hotel, I think, pulled the plug for financial reasons, leaving London without a grand annual fair. Masterpiece, though not a glitzy social event, met the demand. London’s London, with New York the center of the art market. And, practically speaking, buyers of the best English furniture, paintings, sculpture, and silver tend to be English and American, not European. So, Masterpiece, not Maastricht, better serves that niche.

Here we go. Ronald Phillips’s George III ormolu mounted chandelier from 1780 isn’t for a starter flat in gentrifying Hackney or Lambeth, and not for the novice collector unless he or she is a very rich, very impulsive one. This chandelier wants a taste that’s posh, discerning, and cool, that’s 1960s cool. This is the Masterpiece aesthetic. The first owner was the Duke of Newcastle, but Nancy Lancaster bought it and installed it in each of her three homes. The chandelier is High Nancy Lancaster. It’s seven feet high and nearly four feet wide and $667,000. I think it’s magnificent and imagine it’s resplendent when lit for a dinner in an elegant room with, say, saturated red walls. It’ll inspire even dullards to say interesting things.

Our little Vermont manse, cozy and old, has eight-foot ceilings, so the only thing we could do with it would be to hang it as is and pretend it’s our unique, kinky twist on a Christmas tree. If I had $667K.

So, having introduced the chandelier, I’ll say there are plenty of paintings and drawings at the fair, mostly modern, but for this story I’m trying a “no flat art” tack. Well, almost none, since I saw one painting that might not strictly be a masterpiece, but it’s irresistible. I was a paintings curator but sometimes get sick of their snob status.

I’ve written about the New York silver dealer S. J. Shrubsole now and then, only because they offer the best antique English silver and are one of the few old-time, top-line silver dealers left. Eric Shrubsole, who established the New York gallery in 1936, died a few years ago at age 102. He was a sparkling, plucky connoisseur and salesman to star collectors such as Irwin Untermyer, Henry du Pont, and William Randolph Hearst. Shrubsole bought and sold when old English families were unloading their silver, some to pay socialist taxes, some to buy coal for the furnace.

The firm’s still in the family. Tim Martin, the owner, and the staff are exacting connoisseurs but work to demystify antique silver. They offer the best old silver but make owning it feel like the modern thing to do. Part of this comes from attention to provenance and the lives of the original owners.

Shrubsole is selling a set of eight gilded candlesticks made by Paul Storr in 1816 and bought by George Watson-Taylor, who commissioned Storr, at the height of his powers, to make these, the ultimate in luxury lighting. Storr (London’s most famous maker, alongside Paul de Lamerie, of high-end silver) met his era’s taste for heavy, sculptural wares with the most advanced casting technology.

Watson-Taylor owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. Through a pair of well-timed family deaths, he inherited wealth, and in the 1810s the sugar business was as hot as Big Tech circa 1999. He was, the king aside, England’s richest man.

The candlesticks together weigh 390 ounces. That’s hefty. I hope the lucky buyer of the Clumber Park chandelier has cash to spare, but, if not, these sticks would make any table seem like a trip through the Milky Way. At the base of each are the personifications of the four seasons in deep, crisp relief. They’re sculptural, and think Canova. Leaves and clumps of fruit decorate the baluster stems.

It took Watson-Taylor about ten years to blow his fortune almost in its entirety. Praise the Lord, his father-in-law was a duke. The Duchess of St. Albans bought much of his silver, and the sticks were later owned by her stepdaughter, Angela Burdett-Coutts, a great silver collector. Shrubsole is offering the set, the only set of eight Storr candlesticks known, for $650,000.

I saw two things I liked that are historicist but in different ways. Anthony Outred, the London dealer, is selling four dinner plates from the Raphael Service, the 50-place setting service commissioned by Czar Alexander III in 1883. It’s one of the triumphs of Russia’s Imperial Porcelain Factory, and it took 20 years to finish. The painting, palette, and design are sublime. Red ground hexagonal panels filled with different mythological figures are surrounded by Greek key borders, with more figures and gray round panels of grotesqueries, little medallions with figures, and a gilded border. Red, celadon green, grisaille, cream, and gold play well together. Intricate, yes, but not cluttered.

The design is based on Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican loggias, a copy of which Catherine the Great installed in one of her palaces. The set is split up now and all over the place. Until Nicholas II’s death ended the monarchy, pieces were given as imperial Christmas gifts. Nicholas’s mother, Empress Maria Feodorovna, owned them, taking them with her when she fled Russia on the heels of the Bolsheviks. They’re rare, and at $49,000, the four plates are priced reasonably. A set of twelve plates sold at auction for $165,000 a few years ago.

Catherine the Great, Alexander, and Nicholas together imported a bit of Renaissance Rome to Russia, using Raphael to help give the court some class. Alexander III in particular wanted to raise Russian porcelain in status and quality to the ranks of Europe’s best.

James Freeman Gallery in London specializes in art-historical references in contemporary art. Carolein Smit’s Fallen Angel is an impressive, nearly life-size glazed earthenware take on evil angels described in the New Testament as having been tossed from heaven. Bruegel, Raphael, Rubens, even Cabanel and Thomas Lawrence depicted these original nogoodniks-in-the-sky.

Smit, who’s Dutch, gives us a brilliant rendition, and, let’s face it, fallen angels have cachet in any era. He’s captured at the moment of impact, so he’s a little schmutzed. He’s coated in a golden glaze that shimmers, but bits of molten rock appear in stress points. The sculpture’s modeled by hand and detailed. The clay has the look of being squeezed by hand. The thing’s built around a clay frame that looks like a cathedral vault. It’s brilliant, and at $35,000 a good buy. It feels biblical, Book of Revelations biblical, and functions well as a warning to young children.

Art Ancient offers high-quality antiquities, but I wasn’t prepared for a 30-million-year-old gogotte. It pushes the notion of antiquity beyond the scope of human imagination.

This is rock art, something new to me, and it’s more than a revival and rehabilitation of the Pet Rock craze in the mid 1970s. That was the ultimate marketing gimmick, in which Mexican beach rocks were individually sold at a boutique price via mail order and shipped in fancy boxes with air holes as if they were pedigreed pets. I thought it was a measure of a time when spoiled, libertine nihilists were finally so obnoxious, so self-absorbed, that rocks were the only companions they’d tolerate, and who’d tolerate them.

The gogette trade is different. First of all, gogettes are aesthetically striking and satisfying. Art Ancient’s is a coherent, hearty dance of swirls. They bulge and plunge and penetrate. It’s organic, literally, and could be orgasmic, depending on how pornographic the viewer’s frame of mind might be. Second, these 30-million-year-old objects clean up well. The sandstone is a buff off-white. The form’s both geometric and asymmetrical. It’s 44 by 25 inches, a domestic-space size. And it was excavated in Fontainebleau, a place famous for its forest and its palace, used by 34 French kings from Louis the Fat to Napoleon III. That gives it more cachet than (pull a place out of the hat) Poughkeepsie.

I’m not surprised that dealers in Asian art were the first to sell gogottes in the late 2010s. They suggest calligraphy in stone or the mannered forms of Buddhas or kimono-clad actors and courtesans. Some gogottes resolve themselves into abstract human figures, some as mountains. I like the notion that nature’s the best artist. This gogette was sculpted by nature over hundreds of thousands of years as silica coursed through sandstone, forming all these fascinating swirls and dips and leaving a handsome, grainy surface.

Are these things art? No. The only human hand’s the excavator’s and the beautician’s. The gogette at Art Ancient is beautiful, though, and awesome, as well as ornamental. At $209,000, it is, I think very expensive.

Back to Russian royalty and not leaving the realm of classy rocks, Sandra Cronan Ltd. is selling a sapphire, emerald, and diamond peacock necklace and brooch from 1883. Boucheron in Paris made it for Grand Duke Alexis, Alexander III’s brother, who gave it to his wife. It’s part of a tiny group of question-mark necklaces, shaped like a question mark. The peacock’s detachable and can be worn alone. It’s $765,000. Not a bad price. Alexis, as an admiral, led the Russian navy to its cataclysmic defeat in the Russo–Japanese War in 1905. He was already famous as a philanderer and died in 1908, known for “fast women and slow boats.”

In London in the 1670s, floral marquetry furniture was a coveted luxury. With the Civil War and Puritan Commonwealth bad memories, the reign of Charles II made for fancy style. The London furniture-dealer Rolleston Ltd. is selling an oyster-veneered olivewood chest with bird and flower marquetry on cunning bun feet. After so much havoc, buyers wanted their luxury items to reflect fresh beginnings, and what better way than images of spring flowers. It’s in pristine condition. The top’s packed with sumptuous, meticulously crafted designs. It’s $81,000. Cromwell would have found it positively heretical, but the price is attractive.

More to Cromwell’s taste, though 300 years later, is a dining set from 1963 made by the Dane Arne Jacobsen for the faculty lounge in St. Catherine’s College at Oxford. It’s the handsomest thing at the fair. Jacobson was hired to design nearly everything at St. Catherine’s, claimed to be the first new residential college at Oxford since, coincidentally, the days of Charles II. By everything, I mean the building, furniture, textiles, and even cutlery.

The high-back chairs are austere. The Puritans would have liked them. They’re exceedingly comfortable, though, molded to the body, and rosewood is an elegant, expensive wood. The student dining hall got the same design but in oak. The set’s $188,000.

I’ll finish with Winter Hare, from 1910. It’s by the Swedish artist Bruno Liljefors and offered by the Amsterdam dealer Van der Meij for $66,000. Liljefors specialized in painting animals in the wild. They’re not Wegman puppies but sinewy, wary, agile things. His coat’s pure white, so it’s a very modern take on Landseer or even Courbet, a very fine animal painter. Winter Hare is a medley of whites. Van Dyck and Hals feel modern because of their black-on-black variations. A black coat isn’t just black but a dozen blacks. Whistler’s tonalism is a version of this.

Nature’s palette is both infinite and, in the case of Winter Hare’s subject and setting, succinct. I watched Harvey a few weeks ago, not the old movie but the video of the stage revival with Jim Parsons. Harvey was the big white rabbit that the main character imagined and calls upon us to imagine. Liljefors does the work for us and convinced me to see Winter Hare as one of the most fun and intriguing objects at this singularly good fair.

I have no big quibbles. Some dealers on the fair site just have a link to their websites but have no art shown as part of the fair. This is like a dealer at a physical fair getting a booth with his name and address on it but with no art displayed. This is an issue of money, I’m sure, but it’s weird. It puffs up the raw number of dealers participating but, in reality, the number of dealers actually showing art is less. The site’s easy to use. Almost all the dealers are using the same format of good photos and discursive text.

I’m looking forward to visiting Masterpiece in London next year, in the flesh.