Market dispatch·London
Selling the Elmhirsts' Vision: Dartington's British Modernists Go Under the Hammer for Charity
Phillips is offering works from the Dartington Hall Estate — British modernists assembled by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, including a Ben Nicholson and two Christopher Woods — with proceeds supporting the Trust's charitable mission. Three lots feature in tonight's Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale.
Three lots in Phillips's Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale in London tonight carry an unusual provenance: they come from Dartington Hall, the Devon estate that was once British art's most ambitious utopian experiment. Ben Nicholson's Cumbrian Cottages (estimated £100,000-£150,000) and two paintings by Christopher Wood, Breton Fisherwoman (£80,000-£120,000) and Fish in a Basket (£70,000-£100,000), are being sold to benefit the Dartington Hall Trust, which uses the estate for charitable work across heritage, the arts and the environment.
The works were assembled by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, the American heiress and Yorkshireman who bought the medieval Dartington estate in 1925 and set in motion what became known as the Dartington experiment: a decades-long programme of cultural, educational and agricultural initiatives built around a radical belief that art and social change belonged together. Their home became a magnet for interwar modernism.
As patrons, the Elmhirsts collected Modern British and American painting and ceramics with remarkable instinct — Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Mark Tobey, who was artist in residence in the 1930s, and Lucie Rie all filled their private rooms, while Bernard Leach taught ceramics on the estate. Phillips's offering reflects those relationships directly: alongside the paintings are Cecil Collins's Dartington landscape with the artist and John Piper's Dartington Hall, plus a ceramics group led by a manganese-speckled bowl by Lucie Rie, with vases by Leach and Shoji Hamada and works by William Staite Murray, Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie and Norah Braden.
For the Trust, the sale is practical as well as symbolic. The estate still hosts the Dartington International Summer School and other programmes descended from the Elmhirsts' founding vision, and proceeds from the auction go toward safeguarding that legacy for future generations. In a Frieze Week saleroom dominated by eight-figure trophies, the Dartington lots offer something rarer: modernism with a mission attached.
