Latest news with #Sèvres
Telegraph
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur: An awkward, snarky venture devoid of class and wit
What an awkward, snarky venture Grayson Perry 's new exhibition proves to be. The root cause of the problem? His disdain for the Wallace Collection to which he was invited to respond. Bagging a show by Perry – who has worked successfully with other museums in the past – must have seemed like a coup. Surely, his indestructible popularity would attract new audiences to this national museum just north of London's Oxford Street, which deserves improved footfall? Recently, Perry, a brilliant media personality, popped up dressed as a kingfisher on The Masked Singer on ITV. Yet, when he engaged with, as he puts it, 'all the gold and sprawling nudes, the curlicues, cartouches and cherubs' at Hertford House, he was left cold. ('I found it cloying,' he says.) So, he came up with a character who, he explains, could 'love' the Wallace 'for me': working-class Shirley Smith, a self-taught artist from Barking, who believed herself to be the 'rightful heir' of its founder, Sir Richard Wallace. Drawings supposedly by Smith appear in Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur, along with black-and-white photographs of Perry, in drag, pretending to be her within the museum's interiors. It's all very arch and over-elaborate, and fails to mask the fact that working on this show seemingly never got Perry's creative juices flowing. At points, his irritation with the project is palpable. In a label, he describes Vase, Eighteenth Century, French, one of several new pots he's produced for the exhibition (alongside tapestries and works on paper), as 'a grumpy outburst in pottery form', a self-consciously 'chunky, crude and earthy' rebuke to 'hyper-refined and crafted 18th-century Sèvres porcelain', which, he continues, 'I have come to loathe'. Okay, so he hates French Rococo style – but, given that this is a speciality of the Wallace Collection, why take this exhibition on? Uninspired, he resorts to addressing themes concerning class, money, and taste that he's tackled umpteen times before, while mimicking, even ripping off, what used to be called 'outsider art', such as Russian 'lubok' prints or the drawings of Madge Gill. It's annoying: Perry's magpie-like, imitative art is so much cleaner and more marketable than its sources. Why is this rich insider (who was knighted a couple of years ago) still masquerading as an outsider when it comes to the visual conventions he adopts? In another label, he confesses, randomly, to a 'persistent prejudice' regarding 'West London': whenever he passes Oxford Circus, he writes, 'I imagine I can smell a great sense of entitlement emanating from people who live in a cossetted bubble of beige international wealth.' While the (centrally located) Wallace Collection may be a sort of palace of historical privilege, it is anything but 'beige'. Perry likes to tease and provoke, but, here, while thumbing his nose, he just comes across as sullen. Where's his famous wit? It's possible, I suppose, he's articulating what some people may feel: that the Wallace Collection is a bastion of elitism, and a turn-off for ordinary gallery-goers. Even if this were true (and I'm unconvinced), I fail to see how the Wallace Collection is served by such a stroppy show.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Earl to auction 450 family artefacts in ultimate attic sale at Holkham Hall in Norfolk
For most people an attic is a place to dump tatty Christmas decorations, unused sports kit, and general junk. For the aristocratic Coke family, custodians of Holkham Hall in Norfolk, things are a little different. From antique furniture to oil paintings, royal mementoes to rugs, its attics, cellars, and storerooms are stuffed almost to the rafters with items collected by ancestors over the past 400 years. Now the current incumbent, Lord Leicester, has decided to have a clear out and will auction off some 450 pieces, many of which have not seen the light of day for decades. 'Some of these things have not been used for three generations, which is 100 years,' says Lord Leicester, 59, whose full name is Thomas Edward Coke, the 8th Earl of Leicester. 'An Etruscan head has just been taken out of my office, which I might miss, but some of the furniture was just cluttering the place up.' Stand out items include an ornate Sèvres porcelain dessert service which has a guide price of £20,000 to £30,000. For that you get almost 80 pieces of fine antique porcelain, including ice cream cups, dessert plates, and a punch bowl. Before Lord Leicester took over the estate in 2007 his father and stepmother had displayed the service, but he and his wife, Polly, were less enthusiastic about the idea. 'Porcelain hanging on the wall did not really do it for me,' he says. Other lots include a Victorian tub armchair in a condition which could politely be described as distressed, with a guide price of £1,000 to £1,500. Alternatively, for £800 to £1,200, you could opt for a pair of cherubs set on a porcelain and ormolu-mounted mantel clock. Fancy a pair of elk antlers for the wall? A 197cm-wide set is on sale priced at £600 to £800. Royal fans might like to bid on an oak chair used at Queen Elizabeth's coronation (estimate £300 to £500). The chair was used by Anne Tennant, Baroness Glenconner, the daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester, who had been one of the late Queen's maids of honour. Not all of the lots will break the bank. Many come with estimates starting at £100 or less including a pair of silver sugar nips, used to cut dainty pieces of sugar from a block, a baby-weighing scale with a wicker basket to hold the infant plus a push along toy dog, and two sets of pre-war golf clubs. In the run up to the sale the estate's collections coordinator and art advisor spent years rifling through the hall cataloguing its contents. Lord and Lady Leicester then went through each item, deciding what to keep and what to sell. 'It took a couple of years,' says Lord Leicester. 'Anything with really, really close historic links to the hall we are keeping. I have got no regrets doing it. I think we have been through a fairly stringent process of what we are keeping.' Holkham Hall was built between 1734 and 1764, and is surrounded by 25,000 acres of land in Wells-next-the-Sea, on the north Norfolk coast. It has been in the Coke family since it was built by the first earl. Today, to keep the estate running, parts of the house are regularly open to the public, and it hosts regular events including a Christmas market and Bear Grylls' Gone Wild Festival. The Palladian stately home has, naturally, appeared in many period dramas, including The Duchess, starring Keira Knightly and Ralph Fiennes, The auction will be held by fine art auction house Sworders at the hall on February 11. Auctioneers expect it to raise a total of between £300,000 and £400,000 and Lord Leicester said he intends to spend the money on cleaning and restoring some of its vast collection of paintings, as well as general repairs and maintenance. And he does not rule out making his own additions to the Holkham Hall collection. 'I might buy one or two pieces of art which are integral to the history of the house,' he says. 'The money will go to good use.'
