LONDON.- All collections are imbued with the personality of their owners, yet sometimes there is a further distinctive dimension: a sense of the place in which they were brought together.

Besides being a collection of great character and discrimination, this is also in many ways a particularly ‘Hampstead’ collection, assembled and enjoyed over many years in a beautiful house in this leafy corner of London. Walking through the rooms, visitors would be greeted with eclectic highlights ranging from Modern British and Irish art to Contemporary Chinese Ink paintings; photographs of polar expeditions to Regency furniture; centuries-old Tibetan figures of lamas to rare books. The collection paints a picture of what seems a particularly British heritage of collecting.

‘I knew the owners of this collection well, and remember the warm and civilised atmosphere of their house. They were in the art world, and as such they bought works with an insider’s knowledge as well as with natural good taste.’ --Philip Hook, Sotheby’s Senior International Specialist

In the 18th and 19th century Hampstead was a village entirely cut off from the city, a place you had to walk to across open countryside, with someone lighting the way with a lantern. Keats lived and wrote there. A number of artists, including Constable, painted there. Gradually it acquired a Bohemian, artistic character, in the 20th century home to artists such as Moore, Hepworth and Nicholson, connoisseurs such as Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark, and a large number of writers including George Orwell, J B Priestley, and the Waugh family. With the Second World War it became the de facto stopping off point for the continental avant-garde fleeing Europe – Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, and Mondrian, for instance, all stopped off in Hampstead on their way to New York. Today it remains the home of writers, actors, film directors, architects, poets and painters.

Modern & Post-War British Art 21–22 November
Harold Gilman A London Scene in Snow, oil on canvas, 1917-18 Estimate £150,000–250,000
Harold Gilman’s paintings, an essay in stillness, appear at first glance to be anything but revolutionary. But in the context of British art in the early 20th century, they are, in their own quiet and covert way, very radical.

Artists like Gilman used colour as a disruptive, shocking force and demanded that art should be concerned with the everyday life of the city. A London Scene in Snow is the perfect example of the Camden Town Group’s unique and shocking works – painting a brave new, urban world, just at the moment the certainties of the ‘Old World’ were being blown to smithereens by the First World War.

Here, Gilman uses greens and purples to lend this drab suburban London street an almost hallucinogenic quality. It is certainly cold and damp out there, but also strange and dislocating. It is no surprise that Van Gogh was a key influence on Gilman – the lamp-post placed in the centre of the composition, dividing it in two, is evocative of the artist, who in turn adopted it from Japanese art. These elements come together to create a resonant, poetic meditation on the urban experience.

C.R.W. Nevinson, Looking down on Downtown, oil on canvas, 1920 Estimate £100,000–150,000
Following the First World War, C.R.W. Nevinson made his first visit to New York in 1919 – a trip that opened his eyes to a completely new environment. It is perhaps easy to forget how futuristic these buildings must have appeared to Europeans of this period, and in light of Nevinson’s prewar enthusiasms for the doctrines of Futurism, it is hardly surprising that he felt he had found a perfect encapsulation of the modern city. Indeed, he declared to one New York journalist that the city was ‘built for me’. The works that were produced as a result all share an incredible dynamism, and in both paint and print we see Nevinson experimenting constantly. Here, from a high viewpoint we look out over the dynamic and soaring architecture of the city that caused him such great excitement.

Irish Art 27 September
Sir John Lavery The Summit of the Jungfrau, 1912 Estimate £150,000–250,000
A powerful and masterly landscape painting of Switzerland by Lavery, The Summit of the Jungfrau’s lyrical curves lead the eye up to the pinnacle whilst maintaining a sense of composure and innate design that hints at the influence of Japanese art.

The British love of the Alps dates back to the early 19th century, to Turner, Byron, Shelley and Ruskin; it was actually on the recommendation of Lady Gwendoline Churchill that Lavery travelled to Wengen for a two-month stay. The highlight of the visit was a journey up to Jungfraujoch station, an enormous engineering feat that had fortuitously opened in August 1912 – after eighteen years and a cost of twelve million francs and twenty-seven lives. Lavery was thus able to make his ascent with a full painting kit, creating a temporary studio and setting for a swift sketch of the visiting party.

Scottish Art 21 November
Samuel John Peploe Reflections, oil on canvas, circa 1908 Estimate £50,000–70,000
Reflections, an evocative and sensual painting built up in soft grey and blue tones by the Scottish Colourist Peploe, fully embraces the idea of l’art pour l’art. Peploe dismissed the long-lasting tradition that art should have symbolic meaning or a didactic purpose and chose to paint freely, whatever he chose and saw as beautiful. This painting demands nothing from the viewer but to be admired. The work also echoes the profound effect of the fluid painting style of Édouard Manet, as Peploe adopts Manet’s use of a mirror to reflect the sitter and setting as seen in the iconic Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère of 1882.

The paintings Peploe created at his studio in 32 York Place, Edinburgh took on a higher key palette; he would often load his broad brush with more than one colour. The rich surface has a smooth and creamy quality, its movement conveying Peploe’s enjoyment in applying the paint thickly, playing up to the fluidity and manipulability of the medium. Peploe later likened painting in oil to dancing: moving on the balls of his feet towards and away from the canvas, with precision and control of gesture.

Contemporary Ink Art Hong Kong 2 October
Xu Lei Shattered Illusion, watercolour, 1997 Estimate £50,000–80,000 / HKD$500,000–800,000
Xu Lei is considered one of the leading contemporary ink artists using the sophisticated gongbi (fine-line) painting technique. As a traditional Chinese medium and form, ink wash painting has evolved and adapted continuously for more than a millennium, and Xu Lei’s work bridges past and present while blending East and West. With a touch of magical realism, the artist envisions the otherworldly nature behind our rational world, with exquisite detail and smooth photographic clarity. His paintings’ iconic shadowy rooms and veiled stages both reveal and conceal the decadent visual culture of China’s imperial past.

In this work, Xu Lei has painted the hardwood armchairs of the Ming dynasty and the horse’s hair in fine line with great detail and high craftsmanship. The frontal arrangement and transparency of the chairs strongly suggest the absence of a sitter, creating an atmosphere of emptiness and stillness. Such enigmatic horses are one of the artist’s most important motifs, symbolising the passing of time as in Chinese literary tradition. The screen is another of his favoured images, inspired by Ming dynasty woodblock prints. Here, they separate the world of the viewer from that of the painting, as if we are looking upon a theatre stage.

Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite & British Impressionist Art 14 December
John Atkinson Grimshaw An autumnal scene at dusk near Leeds, oil on board, 1883 Estimate £120,000–180,000
John Atkinson Grimshaw’s paintings of golden dawn light are the epitome of late 19th century romanticism. What interested him most was the creation of atmospheric effects through the use of light, which has the ability to throw a veil of mystery over the every day. Behind the Tudorinspired walls of these splendid mansions lived the families of the elite in the suburbs of the cities of Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool – the isolation reflected by the bare branches casting shadows over stone walls and leaf-covered lanes.

The Heart of Tantra – Buddhist Art Hong Kong 3 October
A Tibetan gilt-bronze portrait of the fifth Shamarpa, Könchok Yenlak, 16th – 17th century Estimate £12,000–18,000 / HKD 120,000–180,000
This beautiful bronze sculpture is a portrait of a lama seated cross-legged on a rounded lotus throne dating to the 16th – 17th century. Finely cast and richly gilded, it skilfully depicts the serene contemplative expression of the lama and his intricate robes. On the reverse is an intricate inscription identifying the subject as the fifth Shamarpa, Könchok Yenlak, an incarnation lineage holder of the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism.  

The sale presents two further portrait bronzes depicting important historical figures in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Collections 31 October
Howard Carter Ranji and the Champion, 1986 Estimate £800–1,200
A late Regency mahogany pillar bookcase Estimate £3,000–5,000
The three works by British sculptor Howard Carter show a sense of fun – and lack of pretension – in a house that was definitely a family home first and foremost. And what could be more apt for a house not far from Lord’s, than a sculpture of two legends of cricket – W G Grace and Ranji – that was on a widow-sill in one of the bathrooms.

The beautiful cylindrical Regency bookcase is evidence that this was a house filled with books as well as pictures – as you would expect in literary Hampstead – a number of the finest modern first editions and old bindings will appear in the December English Literature sale.