In November 1842, the party spent two weeks in the Holy Land, visiting Jerusalem, Jordan and the Dead Sea, a tour that included a crossing of the Engaddi mountains by night. It was during this trip that Dadd began to exhibit signs of the madness that was to affect him for the rest of his life. He believed that it was his duty to kill those, such as the Pope, who held religious views that differed from his own. Having fallen out with Phillips, he returned to Britain. Such was his mental deterioration that he believed himself under the influence of the Egyptian god Osiris and, in August 1843, he murdered his own father. He fled to France, was captured, brought back to Britain and committed to Bethlem Hospital in London. He remained there until 1864 when he was transferred to Broadmoor, where he died in 1886. At Bethlem, Dadd was encouraged to paint, and sometimes he used his notebooks and sketchbooks to produce works documenting his tour with Phillips.
Peter Nahum, who had seen many examples of Dadd’s work during his career as an auctioneer and art dealer, believed that the large watercolour shown to him in Barnstaple was one of a series painted by Dadd at Bethlem in about 1845. Having had it for years, the owners had hung it in their living room but, believing it to be a print, were about to put it away in the garden shed when they brought it to the Roadshow. Though certain of his attribution, which was also based on the French inscription on the back of the painting, Peter knew he could not prove it without further research, and so he filmed it without a valuation.
Encouraged by the BBC, Peter set to work. Archives at the Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum revealed that the painting could be one of three watercolours known to have been painted there but subsequently lost, while further evidence was supplied by a sketchbook in the Victoria & Albert Museum. In 1857, three Dadd watercolours owned by the Preston collector Thomas Birchall were loaned to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition. One of these was entitled Halt in the Desert. Also known as Encampment or Moonlight in the Desert, this appeared to be the painting discovered in Barnstaple. In 1862, the same painting was shown at the International Exhibition in London, where a critic described it as having ‘a wild feeling, one hardly knows whether more poetical or insane…’ At that point this painting, and the other two – catalogued as Dead Camel and Moonlight in the Desert – disappeared, perhaps lost when Thomas Birchall’s collection was dispersed.
A PROVENANCE CONFIRMED
With the attribution confirmed, the painting, now with its full title, The Artist’s Halt in the Desert, appeared again on a Roadshow in 1987, and Peter was able to provide many details about the painting and its history. He established that among the group around the camp fire are Sir Thomas Phillips and Dadd himself, seated on the far right. The same year, the painting was acquired by the British Museum via a private treaty sale arranged with the owners, for a price of £100,000. This included a contribution from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. At the time, it was the most expensive item to have been found on the Antiques Roadshow.
Since then the painting, now acknowledged as a major work by Dadd, has been widely exhibited in the UK and abroad, and has also been included in exhibitions in Mexico, the United States and Abu Dhabi.
AN ALBUM OF FILIPINO WATERCOLOURS
During its long life, the Roadshow has made a number of overseas programmes, including several in Europe. Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Gibraltar, Ireland and Malta have all hosted the programme, but it was in Belgium that the Roadshow made one of its biggest and most valuable finds. In February 1995, the team visited the Salle de la Madeleine in Brussels, and it was here that a Belgian couple brought in an album containing twenty-five watercolours depicting life in and around Manila in the late nineteenth century.
The owner’s story was that the album had been commissioned from the artist, José Honorato Lozano by his great-great-grandfather, a tobacco merchant, so that his family, and particularly his children, would have a record of their time in the Filipino capital. As he looked through the album’s colourful, highly detailed and often entertaining images Peter Nahum, the paintings specialist on duty, described it as, ‘a kind of pictorial diary that today transports us to another world’.
Though little known outside the Philippines at the time, Lozano was an important local artist who specialised in this kind of topographical material. Born the son of a lighthouse keeper in about 1820, by the age of thirty or so he was regarded in his own country as a watercolourist without rival. He was particularly associated with the local costumbrista tradition, namely the painting of local views as souvenirs for foreign visitors to Manila. He died in 1885, and so this album was probably produced towards the end of his life.
The owners clearly revered it as a memory of their family’s nineteenth century history in Manila, but they were astonished when Peter Nahum valued it for £100,000, at the time one of the highest valuations in the Roadshow’s history. ‘I am flabbergasted!’ was the shocked response.
At the time, some thought that Peter had been over-generous in his valuation of a set of watercolours of limited interest by a painter hitherto unknown in Europe. However, when the album sold later at Christie’s, it fetched over £300,000. Although extraordinary at the time, this was reinforced by a further Christie’s sale, in October 2015, when eleven similar views by Lozano, entitled Types and Costumes of the Philippines, sold for £266,500.
‘They were the most beautiful sculptural objects and made by one of our greatest-ever silversmiths.’
Brand Inglis
A curious fact of Roadshow life is that some of its greatest finds only just make it onto the show. Typical is the story of the set of four Paul Storr salt cellars filmed at Salisbury Cathedral in 1990. The owner came to reception with one of the salts in a brown paper bag, thinking it was made of brass and wanting to know what it was. Penny Brittain, then working on reception, saw the Paul Storr mark and asked him if he had any more. When told there were three more, Penny begged him to go home and fetch them without, of course, revealing anything about them. The owner was reluctant but agreed when offered a taxi to take him home. He did not reappear for ages and everyone had almost given up hope. Finally, near the end of the show, he returned with his wife and all four salts and was filmed by expert Brand Inglis as the last item of the day.
SILVERSMITH TO ROYALTY
Paul Storr (1771–1844) is generally considered to be the most important of the silver and goldsmiths working in Britain during the Regency period. He registered his mark at Goldsmiths’ Hall in 1792, having served a seven-year apprenticeship with the influential, London-based silversmith Andrew Fogelberg, and during the next thirty years developed his reputation as the most creative silversmith of his time. He worked initially on his own and later with the famous firm of Rundell & Bridge. In 1805, the company became Rundell, Bridge & Rundell, and included among its clients some of the wealthiest and most influential people in Britain, including George III, the Prince Regent, and their consorts. Storr designed and made many of these prestigious pieces.
