| | | | | | | | Document | Sale Catalog Br-273 | |
| Auction House | Coxe (Peter) -- from catalog: Peter Coxe, Burrell and Foster | | Sale Location | Mr. Bryan's Picture Gallery, [No.88] Pall Mall, London, England, UK | | Seller(s) | Sloane, Alexander
from catalog: [None]
from other sources: [Sloane] | | Lugt Number | 6815 | | No. of Painting Lots | 74 | | Notes | The title page of the catalogue for this sale announces that a number of Italian paintings from prominent Roman collections would be offered, as well as a group of marble tables -- not necessarily ancient, but including a few from the Chigi collection in Rome -- an ancient bas relief from the Colonna gallery, and two drawings by Raphael. The sale was anonymous, but the introduction stipulates that the contents had been acquired by "a most respected English Gentleman, intimately conversant with the Arts" who had bought them during a long residence in Italy. From Buchanan (Memoirs, II, 1824, pp.112-117, 122-124) one can deduce that this gentleman was a certain Mr. Sloane, a banker who had died in Rome in 1802. (He is often referred to in recent literature as T. Sloane, but Buchanan does not give his first name, and a document in the Roman archives refers to him as "Roberto," i.e. Robert.) Buchanan and Irvine had negotiated for the collection with his son, Alexander, but their offers were refused, and the collection was brought to London to be sold. It presumably still belonged to the family at the present time, but two months before the sale, in a letter dated Apr.10, 1804 (reprinted in H. Brigstocke, William Buchanan and the Nineteenth-Century Art Trade, 1982, p.238), Buchanan mentions that one of the pictures -- a Veronese -- now belonged to "Lubleochi." It is not clear whether he was an intermediary, or was in some other way involved in the negotiations, but it is unlikely the pictures changed hands prior to the auction. From the Buchanan correspondence (Memoirs, 1824, II, pp.122-23) it is clear that Sloane's pictures numbered only 14, and no more than 11 of these found their way into the present auction. (They would appear to be nos.60, 62-65, 67, 69, and 71-74, although two of these, by Dughet, may not have been his.) The auctioneer supplemented these with 63 more lots of primarily Dutch and Flemish pictures which had no connection with the Sloane group. The annotator of the ISGB copy of the catalogue indicates a few lots that belonged later to people such as M.M. Zachary and Morland, and says that lot 70 by Murillo had belonged to the dealer Wm. Comyns. The only other clue about their proprietorship derives from lot 57, Sophonisba by Alessandro Turchi, which had been purchased by the auctioneer's brother, Edward Coxe, at the Godolphin sale the year before. Lot no.52 by Sacchi was probably also his, so he may have consigned a larger group. From this slight evidence it appears that Peter Coxe, the auctioneer, had assembled the remainder of the sale from a variety of sources, including perhaps items that had failed to sell at earlier auctions.
The prices realized at the sale were unusally high, with three of the Sloane pictures exceeding £1000! However, Buchanan tells us that all of the Sloane pictures were left unsold because the owner had placed the reserves too high, and that they were later acquired by himself. The JPGM II copy of the catalogue indicates that seven of the Sloane lots were indeed bought in, and a note at the end of the ISGB catalogue extends this still further: "NB. Observe what follows! It is supposed that the Names of Rivers, Bateman, Tresham, Bettesworth & Westmacott, were made use of -- (& also Segar,) to cover the purchases made for the Proprietors. True enough, I suppose." If none of the lots ostensibly bought by these people were sold, all of the Sloane paintings were indeed bought in, as Buchanan says, mostly by Henry Tresham, who was probably acting for the family, and although the other lots were somewhat more successful, a total of 32 lots were left without buyers, a considerably less successful result than one might have imagined. Nevertheless, a few pictures did change hands for significant amounts: The Duke of Bedford purchased Murillo's Virgin and Infant Christ for £315 (it was sold from the Bedford collection in 1951), while four other lots surpassed £100. The Sloane pictures were subsequently sold piecemeal by Buchanan, but a group of six of them reappeared at Christie's nearly two decades later, on May 1, 1821. Among the Sloane paintings that have been identified are Mazzolino's Passage of the Red Sea (now National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin); Claude's Landscape with Noli me Tangere in the Städelsches Institut, Frankfurt; Claude's Mount Parnassus in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Claude's David at the Cave of Adullam in the National Gallery, London; Claude's Landscape with the Baptism of the Eunuch in the collection of Viscount Allendale; and Veronese's Venus Disarming Cupid now in a private collection in Rome (B. Fredericksen) | | Catalog Location(s) | ISGB Annot. with most buyers and all prices.
JPGM I [annotations used in Sales Contents; photocopy in Provenance Index Sales Files] Annot. with a few buyers and all prices. It belonged to Wm. Seguier and perhaps earlier to his father David.
JPGM II [photocopy in Provenance Index Sales Files] Annot. with a few buyers and all prices.
MMNY Annot. with all prices by an anonymous hand. The approximate sizes of almost all the paintings and also a few comments have been added in pencil by J. Galpine, but they are both scribbled and very faint, making their transcription difficult.
NGL Annot. in pencil with all prices and some comments.
VAL I [photocopy in Provenance Index Sales Files] Annot. in both ink and pencil with all prices, probably by the dealer Woodin.
BML Annot. with prices for the pictures only.
CIL Annot. in pencil with a few prices.
VAL II Annot. in pencil with a few bids, but no prices.
YCNH [photocopy in Provenance Index Sales Files] Annot. with a few comments, mostly on the sculpture.
BLO [photocopy in Provenance Index Sales Files] Not annot., excepting an extended not by lot 75, an ancient bas relief.
RKDH Not annot.
EBNP Not annot.
FLNY Not annot.
SML Not annot. | | Photocopies | NGL (of YCNH) | | See Also | Sale Contents | | | Art Sales Catalogues Online | | | Digitized Catalog - GRI | | | Digitized Catalog - Frick | | | |
|
|