Diego Giacometti, pair of Pommeaux de Canne armchairs (1963) Design evening sale, Christie’s, Paris, 25 May
Estimate €120,000-€180,000 (sold for €570,000 hammer, €685,500 with premium)
Diego Giacometti has long been overshadowed by his elder brother, Alberto, with whom he moved to Paris in 1922 and for whom he frequently sat as a model. Yet he was a prolific furniture designer, particularly after Alberto’s death in 1966. The French couturier Coco Chanel admired his work and acquired this pair of 1963 bronze Pommeaux de Canne armchairs after she fled to Switzerland at the end of the Second World War. Chanel gave the chairs to a Swiss doctor who treated her at the Valmont clinic above Lake Geneva. They have been consigned to Christie’s in Paris directly by the family.
John Hill, The Vegetable System (1759-86) Rare Books, Ketterer Kunst, Hamburg, 23-24 May
Estimate €60,000 (sold for €62,000 hammer, €74,400 with premium)
“I almost fainted at the sight of Hill’s great work,” said the biologist and father of taxonomy Carl Linnaeus of John Hill’s The Vegetable System (1759-86), one of the 18th century’s most profusely illustrated botanical tomes. Hill bankrupted himself to produce the work, which contained more than 1,500 coloured copper plates and surveyed 26,000 plants. He dedicated it to the Prince of Wales, later King George III. Complete and well-preserved sets of The Vegetable System’s 26-folio volumes are rare, but Ketterer Kunst has unearthed a group of 13 that were bound in pairs by the first owner. All but two of them are first editions (volumes one and eleven are second editions).
The Clumber Park manuscript illuminated by the Dunois Master (around 1460)
Illuminated Manuscripts from the collection of Maurice Burrus, Christie’s, King Street, London, 25 May
Estimate £1.5m-£2.5m (unsold)
Almost 40 sacred and secular manuscripts from the eclectic collection of the Alsatian tobacco magnate Maurice Burrus (1882-1959) will appear in public this month at Christie’s, for the first time since he acquired them in the 1920s and 1930s. The specialist Kay Sutton says the sale, which includes prayer books, tales of courtly love and humanist texts, “ticks all the boxes”, combining beautiful illuminations, fine early bindings, market freshness and historical provenance. Two pieces were owned by Antoine de Bourgogne, “le Grand Bâtard”, the illegitimate son of the duke of Burgundy. The Clumber Park manuscript contains poems by the influential late Medieval writer Alain Chartier, and courtly and allegorical scenes by the Dunois Master, a leading illuminator active in Paris in the mid-15th century.
