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Christie's are delighted to be offering property from the unique collection of 20th Century British art from the late Sir Colin and Lady Anderson. Sir Colin (1904-80) wrote in the catalogue to the 1952 exhibition at the Tate Gallery, 'Pure admiration; weakness; love of carved frames; friendship; nostalgia; snobbery; distaste for bare walls; greed of gain - all are possible, and some are respectable, reasons for acquiring a picture. My wife and I confess to more than one of them, but we aim at the first. We must confess that - though not notably promiscuous in our ways - we do embrace with pleasure a large variety of kinds of painting, and of periods of painting too. So that, to visualise the setting from which our contemporary works here shown have come, they must be imagined as mixed with earlier ones of various styles and nationalities. We also find house-room for the unfashionable qualities of light-heartedness, of prettiness, and even of frivolity' (Exhibition catalogue, Seventeen Collectors An exhibition of paintings and sculpture from the private collections of members of the Executive Committee of the Contemporary Art Society, London, Tate Gallery, 1952, p. 11). Sir Colin, who was knighted in 1950, was a key figure in the world of British art: he was, at various times, chairman of the trustees of the Tate Gallery; Chairman of the Contemporary Art Society; a director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and the English Opera Group; a director of the City Arts Trust; trustee of the National Gallery; chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission; Provost of the Royal College of Art; and first Jubilee Medal winner of the Royal Society of Arts. His interest in the arts had begun while he was studying at Trinity College, Oxford, and encouraged through his friendship with Kenneth Clark. On leaving Oxford, in 1925, Sir Colin joined the family-shipping firm, Anderson, Green & Co., which ran the Orient Line to Australia until 1960 when it was absorbed by P&O. During the 1930s he was instrumental in introducing modern design to the ships and breaking away from traditional designs, which favoured an overall feeling of grandeur. Sir Colin managed to persuade the firm's senior managers that their new flagship of the Orient Line, the Orion (1935), should be built to a truly contemporary design, and was entrusted by them, at the age of 29, to bring this about (fig. 1). He found in the young New Zealand architect, Brian O'Rorke, (later R.A., F.R.I.B.A., R.D.I.), someone he would be able to work with on this daunting project. Sir Colin wrote about the utter enormity of the task that he had been set in an article 'Ship Interiors', 'The sheer struggle represented by the creation of the Orion was immense, for almost all of the components that made up her appearance had to be specially designed and made for her. For instance, we were setting out to escape not only from the shape of every handle but from the dominance of brass as a material. We were a spearhead of the use of white metal at sea, though aluminium was not itself yet freely available and anodizing was a new word. We were fighting the baroque figuration of veneered panelling and insisting that straight and uneventful grain was what we must have. We were rejecting all the damask patterns, all the floral patterns, the cut velvet, plush and chintz, the 'galon', the bobbles, and the vaguely Louis cutlery' (About Ourselves, No. 28, June 1969, p. 37). The conception of ship design was not straightforward. Veronica Sekules comments, 'ship design imposed constraints much greater than any experienced on shore. Stringent safety and fire regulations had to be observed, these often inhibiting an ideal arrangement of spaces. Exterior features had to withstand considerable and constant buffeting of the elements from northern storms to the excessive heat of the tropics, changes from one to the other being experienced in a matter of weeks. Furnishings had to stand firmly without producing squeaks and clatters through the movement of the vessel. Public rooms had to be multi-purpose, both to cope with changing climates and varying atmospheres' ('The Ship-owner as an Art patron: Sir Colin Anderson and the Orient line 1930-1960', Decorative Art Society Journal, no. 10, p. 23). The Orion was a truly avant-garde ship, showcasing design on all levels, from the furniture to the cutlery and all fixtures and fittings. Sir Colin continued in 'Ship Interiors', 'As a new ship the Orion was revolutionary as far as British ships were concerned. She not only influenced the interior design of British passenger ships in general but also of hotels, including their furnishing, lighting and general equipment, and of other kinds of transport including train and aeroplane interiors' (op. cit., p. 38). The importance of Sir Colin Anderson's patronage of emerging artists, not only in buying works for his own collection but also commissioning works for ships, cannot be underestimated. The list of principal artists and designers commissioned for Orient Line ships between 1935 and 1960 includes John Armstrong, Edward Bawden, Louis le Brocquy, Marion Dorn, Edward McKnight Kauffer, John Minton, John Nash, Winifred Nicholson, John Piper, Ceri Richards, Julian Trevelyan and John Tunnard. Sir Colin particularly admired the work of Graham Sutherland to whom he had been introduced by Kenneth Clark, and he although no works by Sutherland were commissioned for the ships, he did design a poster for the Orient Line in 1939 [fig.2]. Christie's will be offering four works by Sutherland, including Green Tree Form: Interior of woods (lot 26), which Sir Colin purchased in 1939. This work has since been so widely exhibited since that the backboard is almost obscured by labels. In 1945 Sir Colin acquired Sutherland's impressive 1944 oil, The Intruding Bull (lot 27), for £80. The close relationship between patron and artist is demonstrated in a letter that Sutherland wrote to Sir Colin, 'I do thank you for being literally the only one of my earliest supporters who follows what I am trying to do as I try to do it, naturally, and without slight prompting on my part'. Another artist with whom Sir Colin forged a firm friendship through commissioning work for the Orient Line was Ceri Richards, who designed the Orion brochure (1935) (figs. 3 and 4), the 'Neptune Relief - Conversation piece' for the first class dining saloon on Orcades (II) (1937), and a mural 'Vision of London' for the first class restaurant on Orsova (1954). After the outbreak of World War II, Sir Colin arranged for Ceri and his wife, Frances, to move from London to a small house in the village of Alphamstone on the Suffolk Essex border, for which they paid a low rent. One of the two works included in the sale is an illustrated Christmas card (lot 33) that Ceri and Frances, who also produced work for the Orient Line, sent to Sir Colin and Lady Anderson in 1947. Other artists that Sir Colin patronised included the two Roberts; Colquhoun and Macbryde. During the 1930s Sir Colin and his family had moved to 81 Bedford Gardens, London, and, in 1941, the two Roberts moved into the artists' studios in 77 Bedford Gardens. The extent of Sir Colin's assistance to them is described by Adrian Clark: 'In addition, he helped them [artists] in other ways. In the case of the Roberts, he at one time paid the rent of their flat; he provided them with an account at their suppliers which they could draw upon in order to get materials for painting; and he even equipped them with other essentials such as blankets when their flat was broken into and badly damaged in 1955. All in all, he tried his hardest to help them, eventually writing to the Artists' General Benevolent Institution in early 1956 and requesting it to help the Roberts financially ... This, of course, was all on top of buying their pictures. At the 'Seventeen Collectors' exhibition, which he organised and for which he wrote the foreword, he included amongst his own pictures Two Widows by Macbryde and two oils by Colquhoun, as well as two monotypes. By the time of the 1958 exhibition, he was shown as lending The Two Sisters, Fortune Teller, The Conjuror and Masked Figure by Colquhoun, as well as a number of drawings and monotypes, many of which had been given to him by Colquhoun as a way of repaying some of the money so freely given to them by Anderson (see 'Two British art patrons of the 1940s and 1950s: Sir Colin Anderson and Peter Watson', The British Art Journal, V, No. 2, Autumn 2004, p. 76). Sir Colin's patronage also included Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud and the works that he lent from his collection to the CAS shows in 1950 and 1952 demonstrate his enthusiasm for 20th Century British art; they included works by Edward Ardizonne, Colquhoun, John Craxton, Freud, Barbara Hepworth, David Jones, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Richards, Matthew Smith and Sutherland. Sir Colin and Lady Anderson also collected Art Nouveau and amassed a collection that encompassed a range of objects, including furniture by Gallé and Majorelle, graphics by Alphonse Mucha, jewellery by Lalique and Fouquet, glass by Daum, Gallé and Tiffany and metalware made for Liberty, and in 1978 they gave this collection to the University of East Anglia to be housed in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Sir Colin's interests were wide-ranging and he was chairman of the Hampstead Heath and Old Hampstead Protection Society (now the Heath and Old Hampstead Society), living in Admiral's House in Admiral's Walk for 30 years (1946-76), and he cared passionately about the surrounding area, campaigning for the preservation of the Heath. He also was instrumental in the adoption of lower case instead of capitals in public notices, while he was chairman of the Advisory Committee on Traffic Signs for Motorways. The 21 works that are offered in this sale demonstrate the diversity of Sir Colin's taste for modern art, including both early Bloomsbury and monumental Moore. He also embraced early important British works and was the owner of William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience, gifted to the Tate in 1976. The group reveals Sir Colin's strong belief in British Art and the talents of the then emerging artists, now international names. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY About Ourselves, No. 28, June 1969. Anderson, Sir C., RSA lecture, 'The Interior Design of Passenger Ships', Journal of Royal Society of Arts, 114, 1965. Anderson, Sir C., 'Ship Interiors: when the Breakthrough came', Architectural Review, 141, 1967, pp. 449-452. Berthoud, R., Graham Sutherland A Biography, London, 1982. Clark, A., 'Two British art patrons of the 1940s and 1950s: Sir Colin Anderson and Peter Watson', The British Art Journal, V, No. 2, Autumn 2004, pp. 73-9. Exhibition catalogue, The Private Collector: An Exhibition of Pictures and Sculpture selected from the members of the Contemporary Art Society's own Collections, London, Tate Gallery, 1950. Exhibition catalogue, Seventeen Collectors An exhibition of paintings and sculpture from the private collections of members of the Executive Committee of the Contemporary Art Society, London, Tate Gallery, 1952. Exhibition catalogue, Collection of Sir Colin Anderson, Admiral's House, Hampstead, London, Admiral's House, Hampstead, July 1956. Exhibition catalogue, Private Views: Works from the collections of twenty Friends of the Tate Gallery, London, Tate Gallery, 1963. Exhibition catalogue, Homage to Ceri Richards 1903-1971, London, Fischer Fine Art, 1972. Garner, P. (ed.), The Anderson Collection of Art Nouveau, University of East Anglia, Salisbury Centre for Visual Arts, 1981. Gooding, M., Ceri Richards, Moffat, 2002. Ham & High, Obituaries, 24 October 1980. Johnson, P., exhibition catalogue, Art Nouveau: the Anderson Collection, Norwich, Salisbury Centre for Visual Arts, 1980. Sekules, V., 'The ship-owner as an art patron: Sir Colin Anderson and the Orient Line 1930-1960', Decorative Art Society Journal, no. 10, 1986, pp. 22-33. The Times, Obituaries, 17 October 1980. The Times, Letters, 4 November 1980. We are grateful to Susie Cox, Curator of the P&O Art Collection, for her assistance.

John Piper, C.H. (1903-1992)

Portland Foreshore

細節

John Piper, C.H. (1903-1992)
Portland Foreshore
signed and dated 'John Piper 1953' (lower right)
watercolour, bodycolour and black ink
10¼ x 14½ in. (26 x 36.8 cm.)

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VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.

拍品專文

This work was given by John Piper to a member of Sir Colin and Lady Anderson's family in 1958. It is one of a series of drawings and paintings done for a mural for the Mayo Clinic, USA.

Piper first visited Portland in 1929 and returned with his wife, Myfanwy in 1934. Richard Ingrams comments, 'there was one particular place which seemed to epitomise all that he [Piper] liked about the coast. This was the 'Isle of Portland', near Weymouth in Dorset. Though connected with the mainland by a causeway Portland is an island in everything but name, quite different in character from the mainland ... It is this air of romantic desolation that attracts Piper. The island is famous for its stone - Portland Stone which was used by Inigo Jones and Wren to build their London churches, and later for modern landmarks like Bush House. Although quarrying still goes on here, Piper is drawn to the relics of the past: 'Great rectangular blocks, with cutting marks in regular rows, lie about everywhere, weathering in the rain and wind and odd unrectangular but still angular blocks have been thrown aside, blocks whose stratification has defeated the expert quarryman; other blocks wait to be shipped from the low cliffs, and now wait for ever, for the shipping of stone from the shore near the Bill ceased about fifty years ago and the moss and wind and lichen have had their way with them' (see Piper's Places John Piper in England & Wales, London, 1983, pp. 25, 29).