I won the bookplate of my dreams!
I put a bid on a vintage bookplate design I was hoping for and WON! It's a design by Robert Anning Bell (1894) for the painter Sir Frederic Leighton.
I never imagined this would go up for auction! I've seen it before in real life at Leighton House Museum in London (it's framed on the wall of his study room) and it's also in the British Museum collection. Funnily enough the auction lot was labelled '16 bookplates, various artists' it was by chance I stumbled upon it and it had this design - I don't think you would've been able to just ordinarily search 'Frederic Leighton bookplate'!
Frederic Leighton was a British Victorian painter whose classical paintings were done in an academic style. One of his first major paintings, Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna, received near universal acclaim and was immediately purchased by Queen Victoria on the first day it was exhibited.
Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna, Frederic Leighton, 1853-1855
Leighton was also President of the Royal Academy from 1878–1896. If you live in Sydney around 5 of his works are on display at the Art Gallery of NSW including Winding the Skein (1878).
Robert Anning Bell (1863 – 1933) was a British artist, illustrator and designer. I've previously written about Bell's illustrated works for Poems by John Keats here. His linework is just fantastic! Here are some other bookplates he's designed:
For those of you wondering about auction-specific details, I was on Invaluable which is sort of like an eBay but specifically for auction houses around the world. You can get alerts on certain keywords and there’s a phone app you can use too. The auction lot was actually the first lot for the catalogue and there were around 10 other people, although I happened to be the first and only bid (maybe the others got spooked by the fact it came up first even though it said lot 268 or something!). The key kicker is that auctions tend to have a ‘buyer’s premium’ which is a cost at around 25-30% added to the final hammer price. And if you’re purchasing from overseas be wary of export fees/tariffs/shipping which can end up costing more than the item!
I’ll be keeping a closer eye on upcoming bookplate auctions! You never know what comes up.Â
