The incredible ceramics collection with a very surprising owner
Among the students of Oxford University, Sylvanus Sydney Denton was a name to be conjured with. For many years, he made his money selling bicycles to students, while simultaneously developing a passion for modern and contemporary ceramic art. He amassed a collection of over 220 examples which he kept in a specially built kitchen extension.
Denton died last year at the age of 90 and his collection has gone on view at Sotheby's this week prior to being sold at the end of the month. It is estimated to fetch as much as £1.7 million. It is not known exactly when Denton caught the ceramic bug, but it was probably not until his late forties.
Having done his National Service in Kenya he found work back home in Oxford fixing bikes and refurbishing caravans before investing in a bike and toy shop. By 1982 he had four shops and was displaying his ingenuity buying vintage 19th century bikes on which he posed for the local press.
Sotheby's believes his journey to ceramics began with Modern British art (Henry Moore, LS Lowry and Barbara Hepworth) before he discovered more affordable ceramics by the likes of 1930s refugees from Nazi Germany, Hans Coper and Lucy Rie whose pots were beginning to be seen as fine art and superior to craft.
According to the sale catalogue, one of Denton's earliest acquisitions was a work by Coper which he bought in 1988 at the trailblazing Oxford Gallery, which presented contemporary ceramics with avant-garde modern art by the likes of Terry Frost and Patrick Heron.
Two works he bought there in the 1990s were by Edmund de Waal, the ceramicist and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, long before he was swept up by the upmarket Gagosian contemporary art gallery. Denton also shopped at auction and in 1997 bought a Black Cycladic Form Arrow pot by Coper at Bonhams for about £9,000.
To give an idea how Coper's prices have moved, another Cycladic Form Arrow pot bought by a different collector in the 1970s for £250 sold in 2018 for £381,000. Denton's example at Sotheby's is a comparatively tame £100,000 (check). Sotheby's describes Denton's collection as 'one of the finest collections of studio and contemporary ceramics in private hands'.
Apart from Coper there are several delicate works by Rie in the £25,000-50,000 range, and a standout work by Elizabeth Fritsch, who is currently enjoying a high-profile exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield museum near Leeds. Denton bought Fritsch's 20-inch, vividly coloured 'Spout' Pot (1998) for a double estimate record £10,160 at Bonhams in 2004, since when her record has risen to £51,400 last year. The estimate for Spout Pot has now doubled to £12,000-18,000.
Another auction buy was a playfully twisted 'Monumental Body Pot', by Joanna Constantinidis which Denton bought for a record £1,600 at Bonhams in 2002, two years after she died. Posthumously, her prices have crept up to £15,000 for another Body Pot in 2021 so Denton's example, now estimated at £4,000-£6,000 should make more.
His favoured method of acquisition, however, was to buy directly from the artists themselves; he was very popular with potters. One was Dame Magdalene Odundo, the British Nigerian who was the subject of an impressive exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2019.
Three burnished terracotta pots by her in the sale all date from 1990/91, before she was famous. There is no record of their cost, but by this point art dealers were charging £5,000, compared to £250 in the 1970s. Since then, her prices have been multiplying. At auction in around 2010 they were selling for £10,000-£15,000, but after The Hepworth Wakefield show was announced and she was signed up by leading contemporary art dealer Thomas Dane, wealthy collectors like fashion designer Jonathan Anderson (who has been announced as the new head designer at Dior) began buying her work and at auction they soared to a record £533,400 for one of her pots in 2023.
The estimate on that work was £100,000, a record for Odundo at the time. Now Sotheby's has gone a step further with two from Denton's collection estimated at £150,000 each. This is, though, a collection of value extremes. While most of the value is concentrated in just a handful of artists, the majority of lots are estimated at under £3,000 each, some with no reserve minimum price.
Other artists include Janet and David Leach, the wife and son of the influential potter Bernard Leach, and Richard Batterham, a student of Leach who died in 2021 the same year that a pair of his pots hit a record £20,000 at auction. So, for fledgling ceramic collectors it's time to get on your bikes and bid.
The sanctions that were imposed on Russian businesses after Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 put an end to the regular art sales, worth millions of pounds, which London used to stage mainly for the benefit of Russian buyers. Russian art auctions in London went from being worth over £100 million a year to nothing.
But last year, Sotheby's held a sale – unnoticed by the press – entitled Fabergé, Imperial & Revolutionary Works of Art, which included Russian paintings, and it exceeded its £2.9 million estimate to make £3.9 million. And this November they are planning a repeat. So what is going on?
According to analysis conducted by advisory group Overstone Art Services, Russian art continues to appear, but in different sale categories – from Old Master and 19th century to Modern. Russian art can be bought and sold, so long as the client is not a Russian passport holder or on a sanctions list.
This April, for instance, Sotheby's included two paintings by the 19th century artist Richard Zommer, who worked in Central Asia and would previously have been sold in a Russian art sale, in its sale of Orientalist art together with a variety of European artists.
One of his paintings, a depiction of a chaikhana (or meeting place for travellers) on the Silk Road, was estimated at £20,000 and sold for a record £114,300. Trade sources believe the Russian art market is buoyant within Russia, better than property, and that Russian buyers are still active in the West but operate under a dual nationality, as Ukrainian, say, or Belarusian.
In a statement released to the Telegraph last week, Sotheby's said: 'Today there is a significant diaspora of Russians who collect. As ever, we have worked to ensure that we are complying with sanctions and other restrictions placed on Russian clients and property of Russian origin. Where appropriate, we have also been offering Russian paintings in international sales across various selling locations. While the international auction market for Russian art remains significantly smaller than it was, we have seen areas of positive momentum.'
The statement echoes Overstone's observation that while sale totals are down, average hammer prices for Russian artists have increased, indicating that 'growth is already beginning to occur. If this trend continues, it seems likely that the accessibility of the Russian paintings market will increase, thus allowing for the market to grow again when the situation is more settled.'
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