British and Irish country house contents auctions are usually held on site at the country house, and have been used to raise funds for their owners, usually before selling the house and estate. Such auctions include the sale of high quality antique paintings, furniture, objets d'art, tapestries, books, and other household items.
Country house contents auctions have been held formally since at least the mid 18th century, when dedicated auction houses were founded. The main auctioneers coordinating these sales today are Sotheby's, Christie's and Bonhams, with other auctions conducted by Lawrence's. A high quality auction catalogue is also published, giving details and photographs of the lots, including provenance, technical descriptions and estimated sale price ranges. These catalogues can also become collectables in their own right.
The largest on-site contents auction to date, by proceeds value, is Viscount Leverhulme's Thornton Manor in the Wirral, raising over £9.5 million in 2001. However, in present-day values, the largest is still probably the Earl of Rosebery's Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire, which generated over £6 million in 1977. The Wentworth Woodhouse £15 million auction in 1998 is excluded because the items had not been in situ in the house prior to the auction, and they were not auctioned at the house, but rather in Christie’s London auction rooms. However, all these figures are occasionally eclipsed by the one-off sale of a special painting or drawing (not listed here), such as the private sale of Castle Howard's Sir Joshua Reynolds "Portrait of Omai" to the Tate Britain for £12.5 million in March 2003, and Alnwick Castle's sale of Raphael's "Madonna of the Pinks" to the National Gallery, London for £35 million in 2004. Additionally, there can be the sale of paintings no longer in situ, but on loan to galleries, such as the 7th Duke of Sutherland of Mertoun House who sold Titian’s Diana and Actaeon for £50m in 2008 and Diana and Callisto for £45m in 2012 to the British and Scottish National Galleries, both originally hanging in Bridgewater House from 1854 until 1939.
Below is a list, in reverse chronology, of the most significant country house auctions, including those in Scotland and Wales (if not specifically stated, the house is in England). Also listed are the number of days the auction took to complete (in brackets), the name of the auction house, the gross auction proceeds and the total number of sale lots, if the information is available.
The Lewis chessmen or Uig chessmen, named after the island or the bay where they were found, are a group of distinctive 12th century chess pieces, along with other game pieces, most of which are carved from walrus ivory. Discovered in 1831 on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, they may constitute some of the few complete, surviving medieval chess sets, although it is not clear if a single complete period-accurate set can be assembled from the pieces. When found, the hoard contained 94 objects: 78 chess pieces, 14 tablemen and one belt buckle. Today, 82 pieces are owned and usually exhibited by the British Museum in London, and the remaining 11 are at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh; one chesspiece is owned privately.
Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, and it has additional salerooms in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Milan, Amsterdam, Geneva, Shanghai, and Dubai. It is owned by Groupe Artémis, the holding company of François Pinault. In 2022 Christie's sold US$8.4 billion in art and luxury goods, an all-time high for any auction house. On 15 November 2017, the Salvator Mundi was sold at Christie's in New York for $450 million to Saudi Prince Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud, the highest price ever paid for a painting.
Mentmore Towers, historically known simply as "Mentmore", is a 19th-century English country house built between 1852 and 1854 for the Rothschild family in the village of Mentmore in Buckinghamshire. Sir Joseph Paxton and his son-in-law, George Henry Stokes, designed the building in the 19th-century revival of late 16th and early 17th-century Elizabethan and Jacobean styles called Jacobethan. The house was designed for the banker and collector of fine art Baron Mayer de Rothschild as a country home, and as a display case for his collection of fine art. The mansion has been described as one of the greatest houses of the Victorian era. Mentmore was inherited by Hannah Primrose, Countess of Rosebery, née Rothschild, and owned by her descendants, the Earls of Rosebery.
Sotheby's is a British-founded multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, and maintains a significant presence in the UK.
An art auction or fine art auction is the sale of art works, in most cases in an auction house.
Charles-Louis Clérisseau was a French architect, draughtsman, antiquary, and artist who became a leading authority on ancient Roman architecture and Roman ruins in Italy and France. With his influence extending to Russia, England, and the United States, and clients including Catherine the Great and Thomas Jefferson, Clérisseau played a key role in the genesis of neoclassical architecture during the second half of the 18th century.
Shirburn Castle is a Grade I listed, moated castle located at the village of Shirburn, near Watlington, Oxfordshire. Originally constructed in the fourteenth century, it was renovated and remodelled in the Georgian era by Thomas Parker, the first Earl of Macclesfield who made it his family seat, and altered further in the early nineteenth century. The Earls of Macclesfield remained in residence until 2004, and the castle is still (2022) owned by the Macclesfield family company. It formerly contained an important, early eighteenth century library which, along with valuable paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts including furniture, remained in the ownership of the 9th Earl and were largely dispersed at auction following his departure from the property; notable among these items were George Stubbs's 1768 painting "Brood Mares and Foals", a record setter for the artist at auction in 2010, the Macclesfield Psalter, numerous rare and valuable books, and personal correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton.
Tyninghame House is a mansion in East Lothian, Scotland. It is located by the mouth of the River Tyne, 2⁄3-mile (1.1 km) east of Tyninghame, and 3+3⁄4 miles (6.0 km) west of Dunbar. There was a manor at Tyninghame in 1094, and it was later a property of the Lauder of The Bass family. In the 17th century, it was sold to the Earl of Haddington. The present building dates from 1829 when the 9th Earl of Haddington employed William Burn to greatly enlarge the house in the Baronial style. In 1987 the contents of the house were sold, and the house was divided into flats.
In auctions, the buyer's premium is a charge in addition to the hammer price of an auction item, or lot. The winning bidder is required to pay both the hammer price and the percentage of that price called for by the buyer's premium. It is charged by the auctioneer in addition to the commission which has always been charged by auction houses to sellers. All of the buyer's premium is retained by the auction house and is not shared with the item's seller.
Stobo Castle is located at Stobo in the Scottish Borders, in the former county of Peeblesshire. The Manor of Stobo was originally owned by the Balfour family. It became the family seat of the Graham-Montgomery Baronets from 1767. The building of the present castle began in 1805 and was completed in 1811 under the supervision of architects Archibald and James Elliot. It is currently operated as a health spa. The house is protected as a category A listed building, while the grounds are included in the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland, the national listing of significant parks and gardens.
4 route du Champ d'Entraînement, also known as Villa Windsor, is a historic villa in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France. It is located within the northwest section of the Bois de Boulogne, close to the southern edge of Neuilly-sur-Seine. It was the main residence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor from 1953 until the Duke's death in 1972, and the Duchess continued to live there until she died in 1986.
The Lock is an oil painting by English artist John Constable, finished in 1824. It depicts a rural scene on the River Stour in the English county of Suffolk, one of six paintings within the Six-Footer series. It was auctioned for £22,441,250 at Christie's in London on 3 July 2012.
Portrait of a Commander or A Commander Being Dressed for Battle is a portrait of an unknown man in plate armour, by Peter Paul Rubens. In July 2010 it was sold for £9 million by Christie's after Sotheby's turned it down, suspecting its authenticity as a Rubens. In December 2011, the portrait was placed on loan with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
William Walker Morris was a British nineteenth-century painter of the Victorian period who worked in Greenwich and Deptford, England, and was known particularly for his bucolic genre oil paintings depicting sporting and homestead life, with an emphasis on hunting dogs. His works draw upon the imagery of life in the Scottish Highlands. He died at some time from 1867 to 1881.
Richard Timothy George Mansfield Parker, 9th Earl of Macclesfield is a British peer. He was a member of the House of Lords from 1992 until 1999.
The dispersion of artefacts, through the sale of Irish country house contents, happened often with the destruction of Irish country houses (1919–1923).
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