Special Notice
No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.
This lot will be removed to an off-site warehouse at the close of business on the day of sale - 2 weeks free storage
Pre-Lot Text
The Harmsworth Collection, Property Removed from Lime Lodge, Egham, Surrey (Lots 73-170)
Cecil Bisshopp Harmsworth, 1st Baron Harmsworth (1869-1948) was the brother of newspaper proprietors Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe and Harold Sydney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere. A Liberal politician, he was elected to the House of Commons for Droitwich in 1906 and remained in office until 1910. Between 1911 and 1922 he was M.P. for Luton before becoming Under-Secretary for State of Foreign Affairs from 1919 to 1922. Raised to the peerage in 1939 as Baron Harmsworth of Egham, Surrey, he was succeeded by his second but eldest surviving son Cecil Desmond Bernard Harmsworth.
Desmond Harmsworth, 2nd Baron Harmsworth was born in 1903 and educated at Eton and Christchurch College Oxford. A publisher, poet and artist he married Dorothy Alexander, daughter of the Hon. Joseph Charles Heinlein of Bridgeport, Ohio on the 10th December 1926. Desmond was a confident of literary and artistic giants including James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis and his significance as a publisher and artist in his own right should not be underestimated. 1932 saw his publication of Joyce's Pomes Penyeach, originally published by Obelisk in Paris. In the same year, Harmsworth published The Enemy of the Stars and Thirty Personalities and a Self-Portrait for artist Wyndham Lewis.
Prior to the outbreak of Second World War, Desmond worked as a painter in Tahiti following in the tradition of the Fauves in his expressive use of colour and line. Desmond Harmsworth's only daughter, The Hon. Margaret Philips (1928-2007) kept the artistic flame of her father's memory alive and was a trained sculptress who lived and worked in Paris.
Christie's offers Furniture, Works of Art, Pictures, Silver and Porcelain removed from Lime Lodge, Egham, Surrey.