LONDON.- As part of the sale of an exceptional collection of art, to be presented at auction during the autumn season, Sotheby’s will offer a powerful and masterly landscape of Switzerland: The Summit of the Jungfrau, 1912 by the celebrated Irish painter Sir John Lavery (1856 - 1941).

The painting’s lyrical curves lead the eye up to the pinnacle whilst maintaining a sense of composure and innate design which 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 Winston Churchill’s niece, Lady Gwendoline, that Lavery travelled to the Alpine village of 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 in order to make a swift sketch of the visiting party.

Property from a Hampstead Collection
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.

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.

‘Property from a Hampstead Collection’ will be offered across nine auctions at Sotheby’s London and Hong Kong, from September – December 2017.