The history of cricket in art is up for sale – this is why it will go at a loss

Telegraph

3 days ago

With perfect timing – just as the gripping Test series between England and India concludes – Dreweatts auctioneers announced the sale of what it describes as 'arguably the finest cricket-themed art and memorabilia collection in the world'. No actual bats, bails or balls, but 146 lots of period paintings and prints that provide a visual record of the game going back to its earliest days.
The collection was formed by the late Mark Antony Loveday who died, aged 80, last September. The son of the chairman of the London Stock Exchange, Loveday became a senior partner of Cazenove – the Queen's stockbroker – where he staunchly resisted change until it was merged with the American bank, JP Morgan Chase in 2004. Cricket, however, was his greatest love, having been captain of cricket both at Winchester College and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read modern history.
Loveday's collection was 50 years in the making and considered sufficiently important to have parts of it displayed in the MCC Museum at Lord's Cricket Ground. But its import was not in terms of its art historical or commercial value. The most expensive portrayal of a formal cricket match was a 1907 painting by Albert Chevalier Tayler of a Kent v Lancashire match in Canterbury, commissioned by Kent County Cricket Club, which sold for £680,000 in 2006. Bought by the philanthropist Andrew Brownsword, it hangs in the Long Room Pavilion at Lord's.
But Loveday's whole collection is only estimated at nearer £40,000. What drove him was not financial or artistic value but a Wisden-like desire to compile contemporary visual records of the history of the game. It's a record of who played (the early 19th-century roundarm bowler William Lillywhite is the most frequently depicted), as well as when and where, together with characterful anonymous sitters and locations regardless of who painted them.
One of the joys of this collection, which clearly gave Loveday pleasure in assembling, is the action sighted in an almost encyclopaedic range of historic cricket pitch locations up and down the country. From Lord's and the Oval, through Kent and Surrey in the south, taking in Moulsey Hurst where cricket was first recorded in 1731, it moves on to Eton, Harrow, Oxford, Cambridge, Sandleford Priory in Berkshire with its sloping Capability Brown landscape, then north to Worcester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Durham and up to North Inch in Perth.
And Loveday's compass did not stop there, rotating to Switzerland, Canada, Philadelphia, Melbourne, Egypt and Calcutta, where a cricket pitch within a military fort shows soldiers at play in their pith helmets in 1874, showing off to the locals.
Some of the locals came to play in England. A handsome portrait is of Colonel Kumar Sri Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji II, known as Ranji, who came to Britain in 1888 at the age of 16 to study at Cambridge and became the first person of colour to play Test cricket for England, before returning to India to become the ruler of the princely state of Nawanagar.
Curiously, some of the works for which Loveday paid the most for are now estimated at far less. In 1995, he paid £10,000 for a 1740s drawing of the double wicket version of the game thought to be by Francis Hayman whose original painting of the subject is in the MCC collection. Now downgraded as 'after Hayman' it is estimated at only £2,000.
An early 19th-century portrait of a cricketer in stylish white kit, button-up jacket and a red kerchief holding his bat under his arm cost Loveday £11,750 at Christie's in 2002 but is estimated at just £1,500. In the same sale, he splashed out £5,875 on an English school portrait of a casually dressed young man in a landscape leaning on his bat. The painting now comes with a vague attribution to the circle of Francis Grant, the Victorian artist, but a reduced £1,000 estimate. One reason Christie's don't hold traditional sports sales anymore is because that market is not what it used to be.
The Loveday collection will go on view at Dreweatts in Newbury on Friday week (14 August) to be sold by live auction on Aug 19
An unmissable highlight of the Edinburgh International Festival
The Edinburgh International Festival is with us once again this month. And Lyon & Turnbull auctioneers are out on their own with a contemporary art sale that will test the market for the recently deceased Jack Vettriano, the late great rock'n'rollplaywright John Byrne, and the venerable Scottish artist Victoria Crowe, who is reaching the peak of her observational powers in her 80s.
The odd one out – because he's not Scottish – is John Kirby, an unsettling figurative painter of ambiguous gender subjects who died this year. In the 1990s, Kirby was hot property – bought by Madonna, and used for album covers and film props. His most memorable screen appearance was the Mike Nichols/Robin Williams comedy, The Birdcage (1996), in which Williams tells his son he can't disguise his father's gay relationship by removing a suggestive picture before prospective in-laws arrive 'because it's art'. Kirby's work was also chosen to illustrate the covers of both Frank Delaney's 1989 novel My Dark Rosaleen, and the 1980s paperback edition of Jean Genet's The Miracle of the Rose, a fictionalised version of his years in a penal colony.
Over the years, his fan club of collectors has grown to include actress Whoopi Goldberg, David Hockney, Pet Shop Boys' co-founder Neil Tennant, the fashion designer Thom Browne, and the sculptor, dancer and performance artist Nick Cave (not the Australian punk rocker, that is).
Kirby was discovered in 1985 by the art dealer, Angela Flowers, who bought a work from his St Martin's School of Art Degree Show and then staged regular exhibitions for him. Her son, Matthew Flowers, will hold a memorial exhibition for him at his Cork Street Gallery in November. Few works by Kirby have been sold at auction, the highest price being £37,000, though gallery prices for Kirby can range from £5,000 to £150,000.
Lyon & Turnbull have several Kirby's for sale this month from the collection of the actor Stephen Jenn, who starred opposite David Bowie in Gunslinger's Revenge (1998). Some are unknown even to Flowers, who describes Kirby as 'intensely private'. His relationship with Jenn, who was Kirby's partner and muse for 10 years, was also kept very private.
Estimates for Kirby's work at the sale range from £500 to £5,000. He may not be Scottish, but if Kirby's fan club is anything to go by, his work may well appeal to the theatrical types that frequent Edinburgh during the festival.