Out of the ordinary

A sale of the macabre contains eclectic items, not all of which appeal, a new auction room gets off to a good start and there is interest in the effects from a Northumberland country house

- Huon Mallalieu

THE Auction Room markets itself as Twickenham’s first 21st-century boutique auction business, offering the lowest commission rates in London. It was launched in 2021, perhaps not the most auspicious time, and was an offshoot of The Swan auctions and antiques centre at Tetsworth, close to the M40 in Oxfordshire. Its first sale of the year was on January 31 and it produced by far and away the highest price of the firm’s short career.

This was £227,864 for a console table (Fig 5), which had carried an upper estimate of £2,000. It had come from a house in nearby Sheen and had been owned by the portrait painter Norman Hepple (1908–94). At some point, the vigorously carved marble-topped table had been well, but a little unsympathetically, gilded and painted. It was similar to a table produced by William Kent for Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House in 1729 and certainly it had all Kent’s muscularity. The piece attracted considerable attention, with five serious bidders in person or on the telephone battling it out, the eventual winner being a dealer from Ireland. It would be interesting to see it again after restoration.

By coincidence, a carved and gilt cabinet stand attributable to a younger protégé of Burlington and associate of Kent came up in a Bonhams auction in Edinburgh two days later (Fig 6