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Lot Essay
Henri Vever is as renowned as a connoisseur of Japanese art as he is as a designer of art-nouveau jewellery. His red seal on Japanese prints, as here, is a hallmark of quality. Print collectors are envious of the glorious conditions Vever enjoyed in the decades around 1900, when thousands and thousands of ukiyo-e were circulating in Europe. Vever had the eye and connections to concentrate on fineness of impression, color and rarity, aspects of superior ukiyo-e that were lost on many of his contemporaries who admired the softness and quaintness they saw in faded and worn prints. After Vever died in 1943, his collection went dormant until 1972, when his heirs surprised Sotheby’s, London with the dispersal of the Vever Collection. The first of the four landmark print auctions came in 1974; the second in 1975; the third in 1977; and the final in 1997. H. George Mann in his memoir Sixty Years with Japanese Prints (privately published, 2021) describes the frisson that went through the Japanese print world when the Vever Collection reached the market. He recalls the buzz of anticipation and the dejection of the under-bidder as lot after desired lot went to someone else:
It took a while for me to recover from the Vever sale. The week or so in London went from high to low and back again. The first viewing of the prints at Sotheby’s was exhilarating...But entering the famed auction room with the venerable green felt-covered table where the leading dealers and collectors sat during the auction and where, for many years, objects were passed from person to person during the sale was a new high. I believe there is still a plaque on the wall dedicated to the “underbidder,” the unsung hero of every auction of every object who drives the price up to its winning bid. (p. 59)
For an insider account of the Vever auctions, one now can hear from the auctioneer in Neil Davey’s “Behind the Gavel: The Auctioneer’s Personal Viewpoint,” Impressions, The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America, 42 (2021): 123–29. “We were thrilled,” he writes, “by the quantity and range of objects. Here was a collection of classic early-twentieth-century French taste. . . . My own excitement was nothing compared to the delight that was gripping Jack Hillier [specialist who catalogued the Vever prints], as we unpacked supreme after supreme print, great rarities and some unrecorded images.”
It took a while for me to recover from the Vever sale. The week or so in London went from high to low and back again. The first viewing of the prints at Sotheby’s was exhilarating...But entering the famed auction room with the venerable green felt-covered table where the leading dealers and collectors sat during the auction and where, for many years, objects were passed from person to person during the sale was a new high. I believe there is still a plaque on the wall dedicated to the “underbidder,” the unsung hero of every auction of every object who drives the price up to its winning bid. (p. 59)
For an insider account of the Vever auctions, one now can hear from the auctioneer in Neil Davey’s “Behind the Gavel: The Auctioneer’s Personal Viewpoint,” Impressions, The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America, 42 (2021): 123–29. “We were thrilled,” he writes, “by the quantity and range of objects. Here was a collection of classic early-twentieth-century French taste. . . . My own excitement was nothing compared to the delight that was gripping Jack Hillier [specialist who catalogued the Vever prints], as we unpacked supreme after supreme print, great rarities and some unrecorded images.”