Britain’s provincial auctioneers are frequently the source of intriguing stories about goods that surface unrecognised or with a provenance shrouded in mystery. Titian’s Laughing Man, bought at a Gloucestershire saleroom in 2007 for £2.6 million when estimated at just £3,000 (and now worth £20 million), is a good example of the former.
The latest story, only beginning to unfold, concerns a sculpture of a naked woman that was withdrawn from a sale in Cheshire last week. Estimated to fetch £300, it may turn out to be a valuable work by the British artist Eric Gill that has been missing from the collection of the Manchester Art Gallery for several decades.
The carved stone bust was due to be sold in a mixed art and antiques sale at Adam Partridge Auctioneers near Macclesfield last Thursday. According to Partridge, it had been consigned for sale by a local man in his late seventies who had been a stonemason at J & H Patterson in Manchester. He had been given the sculpture in the Fifties to restore, he told Partridge, but it was never collected.
Adam Partridge is known through his appearances on television valuation programmes such as Flog It!, Bargain Hunt and Cash in the Attic. Last year his company was voted runner-up to Christie’s as internet auctioneer of the year. But his saleroom does not often make headline news. The house record is a mere £27,000 achieved last September for a Chinese libation cup.
Had the withdrawn sculpture been sold last week, it would almost certainly have made more than that. After he advertised the work in the trade press, tentatively attributed on stylistic grounds to Eric Gill, Partridge was inundated with calls from interested art dealers. Sculptures by Gill are rare and have fetched as much as £145,000 at auction. But one dealer informed him that there may be a problem. He pointed out that an identical-looking sculpture is illustrated in a book on Gill by the art historian and former Tate curator Judith Collins, where it is described as belonging to the Manchester Art Gallery and “lost by 1992”. The date means only that the work was missing then, and does not preclude that it may have been lost earlier. Partridge, who had not seen Collins’s book, contacted the Manchester Art Gallery, and withdrew the work, pending further investigation. “I was uneasy about the legal title to the work,” he said.
As yet, Manchester has not confirmed that the withdrawn piece and its missing sculpture are the same. When contacted by The Daily Telegraph last week, a museum spokesman said: “We can confirm that an Eric Gill sculpture of a similar description was acquired by Manchester Art Gallery in 1925 and was recorded as missing in 1970.” But until they had seen the work that was to have been auctioned, they were reluctant to comment further.
Collins notes that the artist appears to have had an on-off relationship with the work because, he wrote in his diary, he “smashed her in half, but mended her”. She titles the missing work as Torso-Woman, and dates it to March 1913. She notes that it was bought by the collector Charles Rutherston in 1914 for 10 guineas, and then given to the Manchester Art Gallery in 1927.
The story so far leaves much to be explained. Assuming the withdrawn work to be the same as the lost sculpture, what were the circumstances in which it went missing? Are there any gallery records? And then, who does have legal title to it?
Partridge says his client has been advised that he has looked after it for so long that it is now his. “I’ve told him I would now estimate it at £30,000 to £50,000. He wants to sell it. He has no intention of passing it back.”
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