An eclectic group of treasured pieces from the collection of Stanley J. Seeger (1930 to 2011) and his partner of thirty-two years, Christopher Cone, will be offered at Sotheby’s in London this spring and summer. A selection of jewels and precious objects, alongside an array of hats and canes, will feature in the online Noble & Private Collections sale, open for bidding from 28 May to 9 June. This will be followed by Shelf Life: Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper from the Library of Stanley J. Seeger & Christopher Cone, a dedicated online sale open for bidding from 23 June to 7 July. Some 280 lots will be presented across both sales, with a combined estimated value in the region of £1.2 million.
Christopher Cone was introduced to Stanley Seeger by the artist John Craxton in 1979. A man of wide-ranging taste, Seeger had a lifelong love of books and believed in reading around a subject: his library of works on Picasso became both serious and extensive, and having studied music at Princeton University, he sought out original scores by composers including Beethoven, Berlioz and Stravinsky. In 2003 the pair acquired Greenway Manor in Devon, where a purpose-built library finally brought the collection together. After leaving Greenway, much of the collection remained in storage in Yorkshire, though a portable selection of treasures was kept in one of Seeger’s old briefcases. As Cone recalls, “ There was something wonderful about having a portable library of masterpieces, a slice of man’s creative genius held in one attaché case.”
The literary highlight is a spectacular four-page autograph manuscript sketch-draft by Ludwig van Beethoven for the overture Die Weihe des Hauses (‘ The Consecration of the House’), op.124 (est. £150,000 to £200,000), the most extensive manuscript by the composer to be offered at auction in twenty years, until now unpublished and unavailable to modern Beethoven scholarship. One of only three large-scale orchestral works Beethoven wrote in his final decade, alongside the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony, it was written at speed at the end of September 1822. These sketches represent the only autograph material for the overture surviving in private hands, and the manuscript once belonged to the nineteenth-century opera singer Jenny Lind (1820 to 1887), the “ Swedish Nightingale.”
Also offered is Virginia Woolf’s copy of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (London: Macmillan, 1908), signed “V. Stephen” on the front endpaper (est. £8,000 to £12,000). Woolf considered the novel to be Hardy’s greatest achievement, bought this copy in her twenties, and kept it for the rest of her life. When she travelled to Max Gate for her first and only meeting with Hardy on 25 July 1926, it was this copy she is presumed to have read on the train from London to Dorchester. Books from Woolf’s library are rare at auction.
Further literary highlights include Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, 1855, first edition (est. £50,000 to £70,000); Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, 1813, first edition (est. £50,000 to £70,000); Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, first edition (est. £8,000 to £12,000); George Eliot’s Middlemarch, first edition in parts (est. £20,000 to £30,000); Sir Alec Guinness’s annotated copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (est. £4,000 to £6,000); a Rudyard Kipling Le Livre de la Jungle, Paris, 1919, in an art deco binding (est. £30,000 to £40,000); and Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in a jewelled binding by Sangorski and Sutcliffe (est. £15,000 to £20,000). Original illustrations include E.H. Shepard’s Pooh and Piglet pen and ink drawing (est. £20,000 to £30,000) and a Beatrix Potter ink and watercolour drawing for her Peter Rabbit story (est. £20,000 to £30,000). Autograph manuscripts include part of the air “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice” from Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice (est. £60,000 to £80,000) and a signed note by John Cage (est. £1,000 to £1,500). Among the prints are Albrecht Dürer’s The Round Crucifixion, an engraving of circa 1519 (est. £15,000 to £25,000), and Rembrandt’s The Pancake Woman, an etching of 1635 (est. £4,000 to £6,000).
The Noble & Private Collections auction includes jewels spanning a millennium, with a focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, punctuated by a 13 carat emerald ring. Highlights include a citrine, turquoise and diamond turtle brooch signed Cartier Paris, circa 1950 (est. £30,000 to £50,000); a diamond owl brooch (est. £4,000 to £6,000); and a diamond bat brooch with plique-à-jour enamel wings (est. £1,500 to £2,500). Fabergé pieces include a jewelled gold-mounted rock crystal model of a chick, St Petersburg, circa 1900 (est. £15,000 to £20,000), and a pair of jewelled gold and enamel cufflinks, Moscow, 1899 to 1908 (est. £6,000 to £8,000). A collection of seven walking sticks and canes, focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (est. £2,000 to £3,000), and an array of hats complete the selection.
(Press Release)
