The Guennol wooden tortoise-form box and cover, Thailand, circa 18th / 19th century

Spink & Son Ltd., London, 1989.

The Guennol Collection (collection of Alastair Bradley and Edith Martin), and thence by descent to the present owner.

Amy G. Poster, The Guennol Collection, vol. III, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1991, p. 103, illus.

A practice of animal form betel-nut vessels can be observed in later Thai art; most notably in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The natural material is used in a manner to create a realistic looking tortoise. The lid curves to conform to the shape of the shell with scales skillfully carved mimicking a geometric pattern.

Within collecting communities, the name ‘Guennol’ has become synonymous with exceptional artworks from the ancient world and beyond. The collection owes its discerning vision to Alastair Bradley (1915-2010) and Edith Park Martin (1917-1989). They chose the name Guennol, a Welsh word, which translates to “Martin”, as a tribute to time spent in Wales during their honeymoon. The Martin’s passion for objects transcended any one collecting category or time period; and their taste was highly personal and eclectic, ranging from ancient China to American folk art. The 1975 first volume publication of their collection produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, following an earlier 1969 exhibition of the collection, dedicates the book to “the fakers and counterfeiters without whom collecting would be considerably less challenging” – a fitting sentiment for two collectors entirely devoted to connoisseurship across multiple fields. A New York Times review for the 2000 exhibition of select works from the Guennol Collection, entitled ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ described the collection has having a ‘a refreshing disregard for the usual categories of art history and an absolute insistence on the primacy of personal response. A result is an extremely diverse collection unified by a singular sensibility, a kind of psychological double self-portrait’.

The Martins’ enthusiasm for collecting was matched only by their generosity. They were consistently philanthropic in their approach to collecting and from the late 1940s, when they first began to collect, offered Guennol works as long-term loans and gifts to various public museums, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where Mr. Martin had been a trustee since 1948 and served as Chair of the Board of Trustees from 1984 to 1989, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which published two volumes of their collection, in 1975 and 1982.

Masterworks from the Guennol have been sold at auction, including the ‘Guennol Lioness’, a masterpiece of Elamite art which achieved a word record price of $57.2m in these rooms on 5th December 2007, lot 30; and the ‘Mahin Banu’ Yongle blue and white ‘grapes’ dish, also sold in these rooms for $5.1m, 17th March 2015, lot 264.