After an auction-starved spring, hats off to Benedict Carter and the Islamic Department at Sotheby’s in London for persevering with their postponed Islamic World and India Sale, originally planned for April. And gorgeous things there are, too: quite enough to make up for the absence of the Chelsea Flower Show this year.
Highlights for Turkish collectors in a sale that spans a thousand years of art will be some wonderful Ottoman textiles from the collection of H Peter Stern, the American collector and Indiaphile who died, aged 90, in 2018. Stern was an avid traveller and collector, and founded the Storm King Art Center – described in his New York Times obituary as ‘one of the most significant sculpture gardens in the world’. He would hang his gorgeous Ottoman voided silk panels like paintings. Among them is this gorgeous early-17th-century voided silk yastik (Lot 168, £10–15,000).
This turquoise pitcher (Lot 98, est £120,000–160,000) has a provenance going back to early-20th-century Alexandria, where it belonged to the Armenian tobacco trader Jacques Matossian.
Fired in Kashan c1200–20, its vivid designs painted on a black ground that covered the newly fashionable white fritware. Similar pottery was found in the 1940s buried in a pit in Gurgan, close to the Caspian Sea in Iran – one theory, writes the Turkish art historian Oya Pancaroğlu, is that a merchant had been hiding them for safekeeping on the eave of the Mongol invasion.
At the other end of the time scale is a 19th-century French version of Chinese-inspired Iznik pottery (Lot 227, est £7,000–10,000). This scalloped dish with its vivid vine leaves and grapes is by the eclectic Théodore Deck (1823–91), who was equally adept at voguish Japonism.
Far from being a virtual event, Arts of the Islamic World & India will include the usual spectacular exhibition as well as online bidding. Viewing, strictly by appointment, is possible until Tuesday. Contact chiara.denicolais@sothebys.com. The live auction starts at 10.30am, British summer time (12.30 Turkish time) on June 10. See the catalogue here.