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More than 350 lots from the collection of the 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma will be offered at Sotheby’s in London on 24 March 2021, with a public exhibition from 20 to 23 March. Spanning jewellery, furniture, paintings, sculpture, books, silver, ceramics and objets d’art, the sale carries individual estimates ranging from £80 to £100,000.
Patricia Edwina Victoria Mountbatten, born in 1924, was the great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, first cousin to Prince Philip and the daughter of Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Britain’s last Viceroy of India, and the heiress and philanthropist Edwina Ashley. In 1943 she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service, where she met John Knatchbull, 7th Lord Brabourne, later an Academy Award-nominated film producer behind titles such as A Passage to India, Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. The couple married at Romsey Abbey in 1946 and remained together for nearly sixty years.
The works come from Newhouse, the couple’s eighteenth-century home, and reflect two great inheritances. Lord Brabourne’s family had settled at Mersham le Hatch in Kent in the 15th century, a house furnished by Thomas Chippendale in the 1770s, while Patricia inherited objects from her parents’ Art Deco penthouse on Park Lane and from the collection of Edwina’s grandfather, the financier Sir Ernest Cassel.
Among the jewels is a gem-set and diamond wreath of carved rubies, emeralds and sapphires in the Art Deco ‘ Tutti Frutti’ style favoured by Edwina Mountbatten (est. £40,000 to £60,000), offered with related dress clips, earrings and a ring. Also included is the Banks Diamond, a late 18th-century brooch incorporating a cushion-shaped yellow diamond given to the explorer and botanist Sir Joseph Banks by his sister around the time of his 1779 marriage, which passed by descent to Patricia (est. £40,000 to £60,000).
The sale reflects the family’s ties to India and to Imperial Russia. A pair of jewelled gold and enamel elephants made in Jaipur in 1946 (est. £2,000 to £3,000) was a gift from Lord Mountbatten to Edwina marking their wedding anniversary, given the year before his appointment as Viceroy. Russian lots include a silver, enamel and hardstone Fabergé timepiece made in St Petersburg between 1896 and 1903, which Patricia kept in her bedroom (est. £15,000 to £25,000).
Family portraits stretching back 500 years include John Michael Wright’s portrait of Jane Monins, painted in 1670, and Thomas Hawker’s portrait of Mary Harvey, the first British female composer to have her works published. Other lots include an Anglo-Indian inlaid bureau on a mahogany stand supplied by Thomas Chippendale to Sir Edward Knatchbull in 1767 (est. £40,000 to £60,000) and a rare Masudaya battery-operated Radicon Robot of 1957, in its original box, given by Lord Mountbatten to his grandchildren (est. £4,000 to £6,000).
(Press Release)
