Saleroom: Overseas interest pours in for Clarice Cliff pieces

By DON MILNE

This is a story about two jugs, an English pottery designer and decorator, and a handful of rich overseas collectors.

It started when James Parkinson, valuations manager for Peter Webb Galleries in Newmarket, was looking at the contents of an Auckland home. Sitting in the fireplace, so the story goes, were two big art deco jugs which had been long in the owner's possession.

Parkinson recognised them as the work of Clarice Cliff, whose distinctive Bizarre ware has been achieving increasingly high prices.

Ross Millar, manager of Webb's decorative arts and antiques department, identified the pattern as Caravan - not common, but certainly not the rarest in the Cliff repertoire.

He decided to offer them in Webb's decorative sale last month, and set a guide of $8000 to $10,000 for the smaller one (250mm tall). The bigger one (290mm) had a great chip out of the rim and a nasty crack running down from it, so Millar set the guide at $2000 to $3000.

Because of the known international interest in Clarice Cliff, he circulated details of the two jugs, and the 12 other examples of her work on offer, to known collectors, agents and galleries.

Enter the agent for an overseas buyer, anxious to buy the two jugs before they went to auction. Three offers were made - the last of $45,000, $32,000 more than the total of the two highest guides.

Dilemma. Should he take the offer, much higher than the vendors (and Webb's) were expecting?

But the catalogues had been distributed, and there was a raft of potential buyers who expected to be able to bid on the jugs

An auctioneer's responsibility is to get the best possible price for the vendor, but he also has a responsibility of good faith towards buyers.

So Millar turned the offer down and the jugs went to auction.

Six of Webb's staff took telephone bids, and bidding for the first peaked at $30,000 - three times the top estimate. Smiles all round; but the second, the damaged jug, did even better, selling for $36,000 to the same telephone bidder (without including buyer's premium and GST). Even more smiles, and not a few expressions of relief.

Where are they going? The successful bids came from Australia, but the word is that they are headed for a collector in the United States.

The same collector, it has been suggested, paid a world record price of $41,000 for a Clarice Cliff bowl at Dunbar Sloane in Wellington this year.

The low New Zealand dollar and the fact that good pieces keep turning up in New Zealand, plus the ease of modern communication, have aroused international interest in the market here.

For international collectibles, that is. And Clarice Cliff is in that category. Born in 1899, she started work at a Staffordshire pottery at age 13.

She had two years' formal art training but soon developed her own style which, with its bold geometric shapes and combinations of bright colours - a typical piece might be painted in orange, blue, purple and green - seemed to epitomise art deco.

Her heyday lasted over a decade, from 1928 until the beginning of the Second World War, and her trademark Bizarre ware is highly collectable today. Time to clean out those cupboards?

Coming up: Cordy's next catalogue sale is June 19, while Webb's next major art auction is June 26.

Dunbar Sloane plans art and antique sales in Auckland and Wellington next month, while the International Art Centre is also seeking entries for a major Auckland sale on July 26.