A brace of guinea fowl is expected to be the star attraction of a spectacular silver section in next Tuesday’s auction at The Mart Saleroom in Louth.
The sculptures were made by Patrick Mavros, the Zimbabwean artist who found himself in the luxury jewellery business after carving some flower earrings for his wife. Everyone wanted a pair! Four decades later the Harare-based House of Mavros is one of Africa’s most important luxury brands. The Princess of Wales is a fan, owning various sets of Mavros earrings.
The guinea fowl sculptures were made in 1996 and are hallmarked solid silver weighing in at 38.2 troy ounces. (The troy ounce being the weight in which the precious metals world prefers to operate, which is slightly more than a standard ounce.) Even the small pieces of feed corn at which one of the birds is pecking are solid silver.
The guinea fowl are expected to make £2,000 – £3,000 and they are just part of a remarkable collection of bird and animal sculptures that was amassed by a private local silver collector.
Other entries from the collection include woodcock, grouse, stags, a hind, her doe, wild boar, a hare and a dog, mainly dating from the 1960s and 70s, although one of the four stags is Victorian. None are expected to make quite as much as the Mavros but we think the collection could well achieve a total of over £5,000.
Silver prices are very strong at the moment, as are the results the saleroom is seeing in a different field of collecting – taxidermy.
And this auction has one of the strongest entries in that department that we’ve seen in a long time. The jaw-dropping star of the show is the head of a giant water buffalo, which I’m pretty sure is the first water buffalo head we’ve ever offered in an auction. It really is impressive although perhaps just a bit over the top for the average sitting room. That said the estimate is a mere £400-£500, so quite a lot of decoration for the money.
Other taxidermy in the sale includes the heads of a wildebeest, a blesboke antelope and a wild boar, not to mention an elephant foot stick stand, a white pheasant and a red squirrel.
Meanwhile the birds and animals theme continues into the paintings section of the sale. The pictures include an1858 painting of shot game in a landscape by Abel Hold (1815-1891) a Yorkshire artist who exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy. (Estimate £350-£450.) There is also, of course, a Victorian highland cattle scene, this by William Luker (1828-1905), another regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy in the 19th century. Highland Cattle pictures are off the boil at the moment, hence the modest estimate of £150-£250.
The painting expected to achieve the highest price is a still life of flowers in a bronze vase by Harold Clayton (1896-1979), an artist famed for his spectacularly realistic portrayal of flowers whose work regularly makes well into four figures. The presale estimate of this picture is £2,000-£3,000.
The local pictures include seven by Colin Carr, amongst them several favourite Grimsby scenes such as the Bull Ring, the Old Market Place and St James Church. There are also four pictures by John Trickett, the Winteringham Grammar schoolboy who became a professional footballer (Grimsby Town and Torquay), and forklift driver, before making it as a professional artist. The Trickett paintings include a strikingly atmospheric view of the former Humber ferry Tattershall Castle moored on the River Thames, looking towards Big Ben and Westminster. All his paintings have estimates of £200-£500.