auctions Archives - Page 6 of 19

Blackpool, camels and shandy

auctions, eBay

I’m posting like fury this week to try and catch up with all the auctions that are going on. Although this post is in fact about a couple of auctions that have already happened, but are still worth noting.

The first of these is the recent GWRA auction, where we had been hoping to get this Daphne Padden, but were outbid and it went for £280.

I don’t think we’ve seen that one before ever, so I am a bit sad about that. We also failed to buy this Lander too.

Although as it went for just £140 you may deduce that we weren’t trying that hard.

We did, however get this Lander, which I am rather pleased about.

Again, it’s not one that you see very often (something I have mentioned on here before now). But it’s a brilliant piece of what I believe people now refer to as ‘mid-century’ and will look rather good framed.

The auction was chock-full of posters including, interestingly, another two for Blackpool – as far as GWRA knows, both anonymous.

The first one went for £300, the second for a whopping £700, which was almost the record for the entire sale. The actual top price, though was £750, which was paid for this.

With this Fred Taylor coming a close second at £720.

But if you just wanted a nice pictorial seaside poster, quite possibly with a bit of kitsch in it, and you wanted to pay £200-300, you would have been spoiled for choice. Here’s just one of the dozens.

That went for £240, and for ten pounds less you could have had yourself another Daphne Padden as well.

I do like that cat.

But there were a few bargains here and there, at least if you like Peterborough.

Just eighty of your pounds.

There are even one or two bargains still to be had as well. This rather striking Bromfield failed to sell, and is now on offer with a reserve of just £50.

Surely that must have some midcentury appeal somewhere; I’m sure it would go for more than that on eBay.

Also passed and worthy of note is the recent Christies sale, which I did manage to blog about beforehand.

Apart from the obvious conclusion that expensive posters are expensive, what has most caused me to raise an eyebrow here is the price of the little bus posters. Several, like this Anna Zinkeisen, went for more than a thousand pounds.

Although interestingly, this Herry Perry, which had an estimate of £1000-1,500, only fetched £875. And not everything sold either, although I haven’t had the time to do the forensics and find out exactly what.

All of which will make it particularly interesting to see how this Anna Zinkeisen will do on eBay.

It’s currently at £9.99, but with 6 days to go and a reserve that hasn’t been met yet. Watch that space.

While we are watching that eBay space, a few more things that have turned up. This Quantas poster is mostly of interest because it is quirky, has a picture of a camel on it and is not overpriced at £39.

While someone by the name of prbs1929 is also selling a job lot of coach posters at very reasonable prices. This is my favourite.

This, on the other hand, does seem a bit expensive to me.

Although I know nothing about the Maltese poster market and may turn out to be completely wrong about that.

Finally, I think we have a collectable in the making here.

I have no idea what it is trying to tell me, but that’s part of the fun. I think. And there are plenty more to be had if that tickles your fancy.

Forget Frontiers

auctions

It’s just one auction after another at the moment, which is in some ways a bit of a shame as I have other interesting things to tell you as well. But first, let’s try and make a bit of headway with the backlog. Today’s auction is Van Sabben, taking place at the end of the week.

For once, they don’t have a great number of British posters, something which has forced me to take a closer look at some of the others. Which leads me in turn to the conclusion that there are some rather good Dutch posters from the 1950s out there. These two are my particular favourites – they’re in one lot together.

Max Velthuys, 1955, est. €120-300 (with one other poster)

With this only a hair’s breadth behind.

Cornelius van Velsen, 1958, est. €90-160

Really, at those prices I am almost tempted to buy one.

But back to the matter in hand, because there are a few British posters in there too, and some are worth a closer look. Of which the best, and most interesting, is probably this one, for being an airline poster that I have not only never seen before but also quite like.

Mogley, 1951, est. €§80-350

If anyone can knows about Mogley, I’d be very grateful. All I can glean from the internet is that it is a very popular name for dogs.

This is also quite nice, although less rare – I’ve seen it somewhere else quite recently.

Anonymous, 1954, est. €120-280

Meanwhile, this is an oddity, not just because I am looking at a film poster but also because it’s by Arpad Elfer. Everything of his I see, I like, which means that he has been mentioned on here before. But there isn’t enough of his stuff and I don’t know very much about him at all.

Arpad Elfer, 1950, est. €90-150

Apologies for the small picture there.

There are a smattering of railway posters too, of which this has to be my favourite, even though it’s almost certainly in contravention of the Trades Descriptions Act.

Anonymous, 1950, est. €150-250

And finally, a few propaganda posters as well. This is definitely the most striking, although I’m not sure most people would want to have it on their wall.

Anonymous, 1950, est. €150-300

The next two are less graphically interesting, but notable because you could have bought the first on eBay for just £4.99 last week. We didn’t, which was possibly a mistake.

Harold Pym, 1943, est. €100-200

Anonymous, 1944, est. €120-250

A couple of comments here. One is that I’ve put Van Sabben’s dates in the captions, but I’m unless I am much mistaken, those posters are actually earlier than that, from 1940 or so. They date from a period in the war when the Ministry of Information not only hadn’t quite got to grips with how wartime propaganda might work, in particular thinking that its duty was to uphold morale, but also didn’t have a single positive thing to say about the progress of the war. Not a situation which makes for inspiring rhetoric. The other is that if they can go for either £4.99 or €200, what are they actually worth? This is something we can consider at greater length when I get round to looking at Onslows, where there are World War Two posters by the gross.

And that’s about your lot, unless I’ve piqued your interest in Dutch poster design. In which case you’ve got about another six hundred to go through in their catalogue.

Anonymous, 1960, est. €60-120

More later this week, I hope, as I am intending to tell you all about GPO forms (trust me, it’s more interesting than it sounds) and possibly be a bit smug about some posters we’ve bought as well.

Setting off

auctions

Small Crownfolio has just started doing sets in maths. Turns out it’s going to come in quite handy on here too, because it’s pretty much the only way I can find to get a handle on the next Christies poster sale, which is bearing down on us like a juggernaut upon a hedgehog (translation, it’s on Thursday this week).

There are a few sets, as ever, which are outside the purview of this blog, like the set of foreign posters.

Rene Gruau, 1963, est. £800-1,200

More surprisingly, there is also the set of film posters.

Saul Bass, 1958, est. £4,000-6,000

What does it mean that the poster and film poster sales are combined? Are the two worlds starting to come together because they are all being bought for their design? Or does it mean that each sale on its own couldn’t bring in enough lots to be worth running? Or am I over-interpreting everything hugely?

Amongst the posters that I am prepared to be interested in, most of the usual suspects are present.

Theyre Lee-Elliott, 1946, est. £700-900

Francis Bernard, 1932, est. £4,000-6,000

Edmond Vaughan, 1932, est. £1,200-1,800

David Klein, 1960, est. £800-1,200

Set of posters that Crownfolio has seen before at very many auctions = {airline posters, railway posters, nice posters by David Klein}

But there are other more unexpected aggregations too. How about the set of posters with posh people on them?

Harry Tittensor, 1941, est. £1,000-1,500

Frank Newbould, 1935, est. £3,000-5,000

Charles Mozley, 1939, est. £800-1,200

George Sheringham, 1926, est. £1,000-1,500

It’s quite a big set once you start looking fot them. And that’s not even including the somewhat related set of people doing posh sports.

Anna Zinkeisen, 1934, est. £700-900

Herry Perry, 1935, est. £1,000-1,500

Davies, 1939, est. £700-900

As you may be able to guess from the last few images, there is also a further interesting set, which is the set of small London Transport bus posters. The cardinality of this set is nineteen, which is nineteen more than you usually get in a Christies sale or indeed almost anywhere else. I wonder whether this is one person’s collection?

Andre Marty, 1933, est. £1,000-1,500

Mostly this set overlaps with the set of sporting posters, but there are a few rather pleasing exceptions.

Paul Nash, 1935, est. £1,000-1,500

Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, 1939, est. £800-1,200

Anna Zinkeisen, 1934, est. £700-900

All of them, whatever the subject, give me that same sense of monetary vertigo, because those estimates mean a lot of money for a very small piece of paper. Each one is just 25 x 31cm, which is not very big at all.

Eckersley Lombers, 1936, est. £1,000-1,500

Of course there are also plenty of things which don’t fit into tidy sets, like this Olympic Abram Games which I can say with some confidence that I’ve never seen before.

Abram Games, 1948, est. £2,000-3,000

This Frank Sherwin is also interesting, at least to me, because I posted about the original painting not so long ago and now here is the poster in a sale.

Frank Sherwin, est. £1,000-1,500

I still like it, but not enough to buy it.

There’s also a single Empire Marketing Board poster.

Charles Pears, 1928, est. £1,500-2,000

Now this came up recently, somewhere, and I’m wondering whether it might be the very same poster. Except I can’t remember how or where. Can anyone enlighten me?

Designer’s eye

auctions

So here I am submerged in house renovations when there are poster auctions which I need to tell you about. First in the line, mainly because it’s in just a few days time, is the forthcoming Swann Auction of Modernist Posters.

Now, with their being in New York, there are usually only one or two items of interest for us in a Swann auction, things like this, which although wonderful are somewhat outside the Quad Royal remit.

Allner, est. $1,500-2,000

Matter, 1938, est. $2,000-3000

There are also a set of Theyre Lee-Elliott posters for the embryonic British Airways.

All three are from 1938 and estimated at $800-1,200. While we’re on the subject of British Airways, there is also this, which is apparently a very early example of photography in an airline poster.

Anonymous, c.1938, est. $800-1,200

If only flying were so glamorous now.

The main reason we’re here, however, is lots 185-222 which are, in the main, from the collection of F H K Henrion. There is one piece of his own work.

F H K Henrion, 1943, est. $600-900

But what’s really going on is Henrion looking at the work of his fellow designers. So there are examples from Reginald Mount, Pat Keely, Hans Schleger, Eckersley and many others – so many that I can’t include all of the ones I like.

Reginald Mount, 1944, est. $600-900

Pat Keely, 1941, est. $400-600

Hans Schleger, 1940, est. $400-600

As well as a substantial selection of Abram Games’ designs; I don’t know if they were friends or whether Henrion was a particular admirer of his work.

Abram Games, 1941, est. $2,000-3,000

Abram Games, 1945, est. $700-1,000

Abram Games, 1955, est. $2,000-3,000

I’ve even found a rare example of an Ashley Havinden poster.

Ashley Havinden, 1950, est. $400-600

Not everything is by a big name, either. This very striking wartime image is simply by A.R., about whom I can tell you nothing.

A.R., 1941, est. $500-750

Henrion clearly never stopped looking at posters and thinking about them as long as he worked, because there are a host of later examples too.

So I strongly suggest you go over there and take a peek, not only for the insight into a designer looking, but also because Swann’s catalogues are properly written and informative.

Manfred Reiss, 1955, est. $400-600

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to order a skip.

Results

auctions

I promised a while back that’s I’d revisit the most recent Great Central Railwayana auction and see what the posters on offer actually went for. A course of action necessitated by the fact that railwayana auctions never, it seems, publish an estimate of what they think a poster is going to sell for. This sometimes makes me think that I must be missing out on loads of cheap bargains, passed over by railway enthusiasts who would rather look at pictures of trains, or at a push, landscapes.

Claude Buckle, sold for £300

This was probably true once upon a time, but it definitely isn’t any more. Posters are expensive wherever you buy them, and railwayana auctions are no exception to this rule. The only difference seems to be that posters with a railway rather than design interest might fetch more than they would do at a more general sale, which is fair enough.

Shep, sold for £1550

But landscapes and seaside scenes aren’t exactly going cheap either, with this example inexplicably (to me at least) at the top of the range.

Allinson, sold for £860.

Also failing to be bargains are the more decorative posters that I like the best.

Bromfield, sold for £490

F Gregory Brown, sold for £520.

Even kitsch, which only a few years ago wouldn’t have been very valuable, reaches just the same prices as it would at a general auction sale.

Anon, sold for £300

The news isn’t all bad, as a couple of odd bargains did slip through. I very much liked this poster and said so when I looked over the auction. But I was clearly on my own in this.

Burley, sold for £120

While the Wye Valley was also inexplicably unpopular for a pretty landscape.

Russell, sold for £130

But is there anything else we can conclude beyond my initial assessment that a railwayana auction is unlikely to give you a cheap poster? I’m not sure there is, really. There is a very small chance that you might get a bargain, particularly if you were buying for quality of design rather than for meticulous reproduction of countryside or trains. But equally you might not, and there appears to be no way of telling either. Perhaps the answer is to put a low bid on anything you half-fancy and hope that it works once or twice per sale. But that does seem a bit of a random way of buying, even to me.

If we look wider, there is another, rather terrifying conclusion to draw as well. Because that last auction was actually pretty cheap compared to what else has been going on recently. The most recent GW Railwayana auction was, frankly, boggling in its prices. Here is just a small selection.

Norman Wilkinson, sold for £1,200

Norman Wilkinson, sold for £3,550

Terence Cuneo, sold for £6,100

To me, that’s all looking, well, expensive; not just beyond Onslows’ prices, but nudging Christies too.

Not everything headed out at that kind of stratospheric level though. At this particular auction, the kitsch didn’t do quite as well, in particular this delightful poster which I took a shine to at the time.

Geoff Sadler, sold for £180

Although nothing went desperately cheap, and the right poster, clearly, could get the money in.

Leonard, sold for £440

Neither of these sales are exceptions, either. If I go back to the last couple of GCR auctions, the pattern is very much the same.

Anon, sold for £520

Laurence, sold for £620

Frank Mason, sold for £4,100

With just the very occasional bargain to keep my hopes up.

Lander, sold for £50

Oh, and this, which I was very disappointed to see going cheap, mainly because we’ve got a copy. Never mind.

Tom Purvis, sold for £230

I could go on, but it would only pain me.

Perhaps the most striking thing about railwayana auctions, though, is how much they, and the market, have changed. The magic of the internet allowed me to revisit a GWRA auction from 2004. It’s a different world. There are only about ten posters for sale, of which the vast majority went for very little. £50 could have bought you either of these for example.

Compare that to their last auction, where there are several dozen posters on offer, some of very high quality, and many fetching extremely high prices.

This is a big change indeed in under ten years, and it’s something that isn’t often acknowledged. That includes by the auctions themselves, for whom it seems posters are a bit of a sideline compared to the real business of metal name plates and station platform signs. But these days, the railwayana auctions together must easily turn over as many posters as Onslows and Christies combined. I shall pay them a bit more respect in future. We all should. And perhaps they could return the favour with some estimates.

Peaceful charm

auctions

I’m not really supposed to be here at all, what with it being the Easter holidays and so on. But Great Central Railwayana have sent me the catalogue for their forthcoming auction, and guess what, it’s got posters in it. So I thought you might like to know.

That said, I can’t quite work myself up to a fever pitch of excitement about the selection; rarely have I seen an auction so full of posters which look exactly as I’d expect railway posters to look. This Claude Buckle is probably my favourite of the very many that there are on offer.

Although there are several others which just look wierdly pedantic and over-detailed, like Ladybird drawings except without the kitsch appeal. Fred Taylor is not on form in this one.

While this, by Costelloe, comes from the Observer Book of Bus Spotting.

The area of design where Ladybird illustration shades into kitsch is also present, as with this anonymous effort.

But if railway posters we must have – and it appears we must – there are some to like as well. This series have always been amongst my favourites, because, I think, the typography isn’t boxed off in a frame.

And I’ve always been a sucker for that Festival of Britain-esque typeface anyway.

This Bromfield for Swanage is also rather good.

And I like this one as well, although I am unable to give a coherent explanation as to why.

Maybe I just need a holiday.

Just to keep us all on our toes (see, I was paying attention) there is also a single London Transport poster, by Frank. M. Lea

Perhaps the most interesting set of posters, though, are these three, which to me all look to be stylistic cousins.

To be specific, they are all railway posters with a distinct resemblance to classic Batsford book covers, as designed by Brian Cook.

None of them are, though – the first one is by Birtwhistle, the middle one by Gregory Brown and the very striking version of Dover below is by D. W. Burley.

I’d like to think that it’s someone with particular taste selling their collection, but it’s probably just chance.

You might even include this 1946 Walter Spradbery in the collection too if you were feeling generous.

I’m always rather intrigued by these posters which, although they date from just after the war, still have the ghost logos of the old railway companies on them. It always makes me wonder what people knew, or at least what they wanted to believe. The Railway Executive had been running the railways for six long years, and surely, after the General Election, people must have known that nationalisation was coming. But these few posters still slipped out, as though someone, somewhere, wanted to believe that it would be possible to carry on as though nothing had changed. Even the image here reeks of that kind of nostalgia, as though the art deco days of before the war could still be reached, just a few stops further down the train line. Or am I being too fanciful?

This, of course, is a a railwayana auction, which means that there are no estimates and I do not have the foggiest what any of these posters might fetch. But I am going to make a resolution about that, and at some point in the next week or so (school holidays permitting, which they don’t much), I will go back through a couple of old railwayana catalogues and take a look at achieved prices. And then, probably, curse all the bargains I have missed. Never mind. I’d quite like to know what this would go for too.