Page 26 - Bonhams May 12 16 London

experienced London dealers, later to include John Sparks, Peter
Rolf, Lord Cunliffe (1899 - 1963)
The Cunliffe Collection:
An English Moment in
Chinese Connoisseurship
Bonhams is delighted to be offering a second group of fine ceramics
and works of art from this famous old English collection. Formed by the
second Lord Cunliffe over some two decades from his first purchase at
Bluetts in November 1944, it recalls the ‘third great period’ of collecting outstanding Ming coloured wares, and early archaeological pottery
Chinese ceramics in England during the 19th and 20th century.
Chinese manufactures, and the culture of China, appealed to the
largely uninformed British public as early as 1844, when a huge
‘Industrial’ Exhibition at Hyde Park included large quantities of mod-
ern and old Chinese art objects (of very varying levels of quality). A
series of eight catalogue imprints, totalling 125,000 copies sold out
to the hundreds of thousands of visitors. This public response clearly
demonstrated that the 19th century British fascination with imported
‘things Chinese’ had out-lasted the strongly Neo-Classical taste prev-
alent during the later 18th century, when fanciful amusing Chinoiserie,
and enticing ‘Visions of Cathy’ had largely lost their earlier appeal.
As a result of this revival in enthusiasm for Chinese art during the
Regency and early Victorian decades, a forgotten ‘first’ generation
of Victorian-era enthusiasts emerged specifically collecting Chinese
ceramics. Familiar with shiny, thinly potted brightly-painted Chinese
ceramics since the early 17th century and endlessly attracted to dif-
ferent manifestations of ‘Chinoiserie’ design, these Victorian British
collectors liked ‘China’ well before being introduced to the novel
mysteries of Tang horses, Song Dynasty Ruyao or Ming enamels.
The select high-society group included Aesthetic Movement artists
and fashion setters like Whistler, Rossetti and Wilde, as well as more
serious non-glitterati specialists like Murray Marks and George Salt-
ing. Active in the mid-19th century, many suppliers and dealers were
based, not as after the 1880s in elegant premises in Mayfair and St
James’s, but initially in the network of small Georgian terraces around
Wardour Street in Soho, originally built for Huguenot settlers and now
full of ‘junk shops’.
From the late 1890s, a new taste emerged for archaeological and
scholarly Chinese ceramics, many for the first time emerging from
tombs and excavations. The distinguished Chinese art dealers
Bluetts were among the earliest of a group of knowledgeable and
Boode and Spinks, who educated several generations of Western
(mainly British) buyers in the connoisseurship of Tang sancai, Song
monochromes, Imperial Qing porcelain and all the Works of Art which
accompanied a well-rounded early collection; cloisonné enamel, ar-
chaic bronzes and of course jade carvings dating from the Neolithic
period until the great decades of Qing Dynasty spinach and white
jades from Khotan.
These Londoners, and a few Continental European specialists like
C.T.Loo (unparalleled for his ability to source important early stone
sculpture in China) were throughout the 20th century the greatest
European dealers in Chinese ceramics. Many of them had academic
expertise as good as most contemporaneous museum authorities.
Relying in some cases on the information they derived from formal
associations with Chinese dealers in Shanghai and Beijing, they
were equally confident handling what we now accept are the ‘clas-
sics’ of Chinese ceramics: splendid Song and Ming monochromes,
(when it was still little known but highly rated by Western scholars
familiar with the unexciting European ceramics of similar early date).
These early trade suppliers to new but enthusiastic buyers like Rolf
Cunliffe had the benefit of access to cutting-edge academic knowl-
edge in London. The great early ceramic specialists and authorities,
from Brankston through Eumorfopoulos to David, moved seamlessly
from museum openings, to OCS private dinners, to the basement
at Bluetts. Happily, this close and mutually beneficial relationship in
London continues (in a manner unequalled elsewhere in the Chinese
collecting fraternity) between the UK’s senior Museum experts, art
dealers and auction house specialists.
The pre-eminent levels of stock, and active local client bases, that
these London dealers and auctioneers enjoyed between about
1910-1960, began to end with the emergence of new, richer, equally
well-informed private and trade buyers in Japan and Chinese-speak-
ing Asia. The game was beginning to change significantly during the
1950’s. By then, the early 20th century’s first great English collectors
had seen their collections pass into public ownership (Davis, Rapha-
el); or be dispersed, often at auction (Clark, Sedgwick, Palmer). The
two great Eumorfopoulos auctions in 1936 and 1940 mark the end
of forming these spectacular early collection but there was still great
scope for new English collectors, including the 2nd Baron Cunliffe, to
buy regularly and easily.
They were often buying from older English collections, as the prov-
enance footnotes in this catalogue clearly demonstrate. The radical
novelty of collecting Chinese ceramics in the 1920s and 1930s was
over. The corpus of key basic knowledge about the evolution of
Chinese ceramics, stretching from the Neolithic yellow-clay painted
jars made in Gansu Province to the spectacular Imperial porcelains
commissioned in 18th century Jingdezhen, was established, though
still incomplete. No longer were consignments arriving in London and
Stockholm from sites at Changsha or excavated railway cuttings in
Gansu Province, revealing entirely new categories of early ceramics
over which specialists could pore. The ground rules for dating early
ceramics over porcelains were in place, and transmitted to a wider
public by the OCS (and other) exhibitions in London during the ‘30s
and ‘40s, notably the unprecedented 1935 Royal Academy Loan
Exhibition including masterpieces sent by the Chinese Government.
As the present Lord Cunliffe wrote in 2002 when introducing Bon-
hams’ first sale from this famous collection, this ‘fun’ element still re-
mained a century later, in the 1950s. Easy supply, modest prices and
a sense of fun encouraged his father to try to assemble an ‘Imperial
Yellow’ dinner service incorporating only Ming-period saucer dishes!
He gave up after buying about fifteen such dishes, when the price
began to exceed £5 per dish….
Every collection is formed in its own cultural and social context. This
Cunliffe Sale recreates those decades of utterly pleasurable collect-
ing in England, when interesting material was abundant, competition
between collectors amiable, and prices relatively static.
Bonhams would like to thank Dominic Jellinek for assistance in
researching provenance and purchase information about items in the
Collection.