Jim Peake
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Lot 107
Sappho: An important cameo glass plaque by George Woodall, circa 1913
20 November 2019, 10:30 GMT
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £50,062.50 inc. premium
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Sappho: An important cameo glass plaque by George Woodall, circa 1913
Of oval form in deep claret glass overlaid in opalescent white, carved with an Archaic Greek scene of the lyric poet sitting serenely beneath a tree on a terrace, holding a lyre in her left hand which she plays with her right, her left foot raised upon a classical stool, overlooking an idyllic scene of a harbour and temple in the distance, within a border of stylised stiff leaves, signed 'Geo Woodall', the plaque 15.9cm high, in its original fitted travelling case (2)
Footnotes
Provenance
Commissioned by Clement W Harris, 1913
C W Harris Collection, Sotheby's sale, 16 June 1926, lot 26
Beatrice (Alice) Woodall and thence by family descent to the present owner
Literature
Illustrated by Christopher Woodall Perry, The Cameo Glass of Thomas and George Woodall (2000), p.88 (upper left)
Illustrated by Ray and Lee Grover, English Cameo Glass (1980), p.110, fig.107
Sappho was one of George Woodall's favourite subjects. One of the earliest versions of Sappho is a panel jointly completed with his brother Thomas in 1884, signed 'T & G Woodall, Sappho' and mounted in a satinwood frame (W2790 in the Thomas Webb and Sons price book), for which George's daughter Amy was the model. Formerly in the Nyman Collection and sold by Bonhams in 1999, it is now in the collection of Dudley Museums Service and is illustrated by Perry (2000), p.96, and by Ray and Lee Grover (1988), p.100, fig.71. In March 1903 he also completed Sappho in miniature on an oval brooch (GW121).
The present lot is entered in the Thomas Webb and Sons price book as 'GW154, 6¼ x 5" white on claret oval panel: Sappho. Signed Geo Woodall'. The cost of the work came to £7.10s with a sale price of £21, and it was bought by C W Harris of Woodthorne, Tettenhall, in 1913; a friend of George Woodall and a keen collector of cameo glass. Upon his death in 1926, the year after George Woodall's, it was offered for sale by Sotheby's in London, where it was purchased for £22 by Alice Woodall, his eldest daughter, who went to the auction with her sister Amy to buy the plaque no doubt as a keepsake of their father.
Alice never married and continued to live at Luton House, the family home in Kingswinford, following the death of her parents. When she died in 1954, her youngest sister Connie and their nephew George Calloway Woodall cleared Luton House, where they found George Woodall's room untouched since his death in 1925 some twenty-nine years earlier. This plaque was recovered from a floor safe belonging to Alice, which contained two other pieces of cameo glass (a plaque showing 'Aphrodite Rising from the Waves' and a vase showing 'The Origin of Painting'), and was then valued at £100. Connie and her eldest sister Amy chose to take this glass in lieu of some of the proceeds of the sale of the estate. Sappho went to Connie and the remaining two pieces, together valued at £350, went to Amy and her son George Calloway Woodall. The Origin of Painting vase is Lot 108 in this sale. Sappho has remained in Connie's family since it was inherited by her in 1954 and was on loan to Broadfield House Museum of Glass for a number of years.