Online Auction: 20–27 May 2020 • 3:00 PM BST • London

Danny Katz Selects His Favourite Pieces from the Sale

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  Attributed to Gianfrancesco Susini, after Giambologna
  Bagpiper
  Estimate £10,000–15,000

  I love Renaissance bronzes, although they’ve got to be something. Given the kind of bronzes I’ve handled, they’ve got to be unbelievable to get me going. I think this one’s a real Susini. It’s small but as good as it gets of this type. I thought it was beautiful – and remarkably detailed, right down to the fingernails and cuticles.

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• 

  Frits Thaulow
  A Chateau in Normandy
  Estimate £50,000–70,000

  I have loved Scandinavian art since my twenties, when I lived in Sweden and met the then young art dealer, Verner Amell, and, of course, later through my wife Gry, who is Norwegian. I love the Swedish painters’ understanding of women - whether the writer and artist August Strindberg or Georg Pauli - and their understated way of conveying quiet affection and emotion; and the Norwegians’ feeling for landscape, whether the Romantics such as Dahl, Thomas Fearnley and Peder Balke (a landscape by whom I recently gave to the National Gallery), or the Impressionists like Frits Thaulow. For me, Thaulow was, along with Anders Zorn, the absolute master of painting water and melting snow. His red-brick chateaux, mills or warehouses along icy white river banks, which he painted both in Norway and Normandy, epitomise his aesthetic which comes close to his friend Claude Monet’s.

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• 

  Nuremberg, Germany, mid-16th century
  Fountain Figure of a Putto
  Estimate £8,000–12,000

  In the 1970s, I formed a bronze club with a group of friends: we’d meet at each other’s house every month for dinner and each put one of our bronzes on the table and discuss them. We’d discuss the patinas, whether they were religious or profane, what were the politics at the time of their making etc etc. With these bronzes the idea is to have a group of them and pick them up, with a nice glass of wine, and look at the forms and compositions in different lights. The satisfaction and pleasure of handling these things is just magical.

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• 

  Paul Nash
  Study for Landscape of Bleached Objects
  Estimate £40,000–60,000

  I never understood why Paul Nash isn’t better known – he’s a genius that guy, a major, major painter – but, with a few exceptions, he seems only to be collected by the British, which is a shame. Maybe it’s because his works aren’t surreal enough, according to the canon of European Surrealism – it’s a quieter, more subtle British Surrealism. But he’s wonderful at objets trouvés, which is a great deal of what Surrealism is about. I absolutely loved his recent show at the Tate, it was one of my favourite shows ever - I must have gone about ten times! And this drawing was in that show… I might be sorry to see it go.

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• 

  Attributed to the Alberghetti Foundry, active 16th century
  Mortar, from the collection of Sir Alfred Beit
  Estimate £7,000–10,000

  Those mortars in the sale are fabulous, absolutely fabulous. The tradition of buying these things goes back across generations of collectors. They’re not figurative, but they are beautiful, and far more than utilitarian objects. Sir Alfred Beit was a great collector and his bronzes were on view in his mansion in Millionaire’s Walk in Kensington: the man was a visionary, trained by the last great scholars of the 19th-century tradition, and it was a real honour to know him and to learn from him.

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• 

  Graham Sutherland
  Vine Pergola
  Estimate £40,000–60,000

  I think Sutherland’s reputation really suffered from the debacle with Winston Churchill’s portrait, which was an absolutely marvelous portrait by the way. He was a fabulous painter, at the top of his game and that killed him. I’m a big Sutherland fan. I love those vines and I thought this one was beautiful. They remind me of the famous Elizabethan vine at Hampton Court. It’s the same as with Nash – they see the extraordinary in the everyday and then make the everyday extra-ordinary. He has a very obscure look on the natural world and I like that about him.

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• 

  Reg Butler
  Figure in Space
  Estimate £40,000–60,000

  I paid a fortune for this! But it’s a great sculpture. Alfred Barr bought his work for MoMA in New York – he saw all that generation of young British sculptors at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and recognized how good they were, how fresh their vision was – and MoMA showed them alongside Giacometti, Richier etc. as the best in new art – which they thoroughly deserved. I did a beautiful show a few years ago entitled ‘The Shape of Things’ about that whole generation and how they relate to the likes of Epstein, Moore and Hepworth: I’m not really known as a Modern British dealer; it’s more something I collect personally – but every now and then I put on shows of the artists I like and collect.

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• 

  Frank Dobson
  Study for Leisure II
  Estimate £3,000–5,000

  I don’t buy Dobson drawings because they’re associated with sculpture, as references to the process – I just think they are beautiful drawings of nudes, as good as anything done over previous centuries. His work, both sculpture and drawings, is highly original, highly idiomatic – it doesn’t necessarily fit with his peers such as Moore and Hepworth, but I like it for that: he’s his own man.

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