STANSTED MOUNTFITCHET.- Sworders are to offer a pair of Chinese bowls from one of the most significant 20th century collections of jade in the world at their May 16 Asian Art auction.

Another item from the collection, a Ming horse, set the world record price for a single piece of jade when sold by Spink for £27,000 in 1969 (the equivalent of close to £2 million today).

The 13.2cm diameter pair of Chinese pale celadon jade chrysanthemum bowls date to the Jiaqing period (1796-1820) are estimated at £8000-12,000 and have a provenance to the collection of Sir Ronald Lindsay, British Ambassador to the United States from 1930, and his wife Lady Lindsay.

Both were keen collectors of Chinese jades and, whilst working at the British Embassy in Washington, they found that their colleague, Miss Irene Boyle, shared this interest. Miss Boyle was employed as Social Secretary at the Embassy and was pivotal in organising the State Visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Washington in 1939 – the first-ever visit to the United States by a reigning monarch – and later, in 1957, helped to arrange the visit of Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Philip.

This mutual appreciation of Chinese art led to Sir Ronald and his wife gifting various pieces of their collection to Miss Boyle, including the bowls within this lot, which are pictured in the interior of her apartment, at 2500 Q Street, Washington DC, on a Christmas card sent around 1955.

On her death in 1966, another of the Ambassador’s gifts, a celebrated Chinese Ming period jade horse, was sold by Spink to Mr Somerset de Chair of St Osyth Priory for £27,000, a world record price at the time.

As the Daily Telegraph cutting that accompanies this lot reported at the time, de Chair financed the acquisition from the proceeds of a reserve fund derived from gravel deposits near St Osyth: “Mr de Chair has said that, in effect, 400,000 tons of gravel have been converted into 23lb of jade.”

Copies of the photograph of Miss Boyle’s apartment with the bowls in situ also accompanies the lot, as do other documents relating to the collection.