Lobster and Sea Urchins

John Craxton drew the impromptu sketch on his personal note paper. It was inspired by the menu of “The Hole in the Wall”, a famous restaurant in Bath, where he and Barry Kay were once dining together. Craxton’s initialled dedication reads: «for Barry Kay – J. C.». The drawing dates from 1964, when the two of them befriended each other during Kay’s assignment of designing the ballet Divertimento at the Bath Festival of the Arts.

Not for sale

---

Anna Pavlova

A photograph of Anna Pavlova showing her as the leading sylph in Les Sylphides, taken in 1909 at Atelier Ernst Schneider, Unter den Linden in Berlin. Palova dedicated, autographed and dated the print on 9 March 1912 while on a performance tour in Leeds, England. The dedicatee is a certain Alfredo, whose family name is unfortunately indecipherable, as is a short line of accompanying text.

Price on application

---

---

Music Box

Conceived in 1979, this unique music box is a satiric portrayal of a British art and ballet critic and his wife, a former ballerina, depicting what some thought to be their overzealous and ambiguous interest in Rudolf Nureyev – to the accompaniment of the Swan Lake theme tune.

Not for sale

---

Ceremonial Mask

Possibly an ancestral spirit mask, as implied by the white face, portraying a human female with animal attributes, probably those of a gorilla; Africa, 2nd half 20th century, believed to be from Cameroon or Gabon.

Price on application

---

Carmen Ballet

costume designs for Renée (Zizi) Jeanmaire as Carmen and Roland Petit as Don Jose; designed for Les Ballets de Paris de Roland Petit, 1949.

Price on application

---

The Seven Deadly Sins

Coiffure and make-up design for Vanity, depicting the characters Anna 1 and Anna 2, featuring in Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet The Seven Deadly Sins, choreographed to the score by Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill; Western Theatre Ballet, Edinburgh International Festival 1961.

Price on application

---

Baron Tuzenbach

An unsigned costume design believed to be by Peter Farmer and inscribed «Baron Toozenbach, Act 3, in a civilian suit» – a character in Anton Čechov’s play Three Sisters (sometimes spelt Tuzenbach). The drawing’s date of creation is unknown but likely to have been executed in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Price on application

---

Painting for a Ceramic Tile

In 1944, Arthur Boyd, together with John Perceval, set up a pottery workshop in Australia, where he turned to making terracotta sculptures. He first designed ceramic tiles in 1949. The above tile painting presumably dates from his London days when he started work on a new series of ceramic paintings at his studio in Highgate in 1961.

Price on application

---

A drawing of a Bijin-ga, a ‘beautiful woman portrait’ [lit], signed by Chōbunsai Eishi, who was known primarily for his depictions of tall, thin, graceful beauties. Paintings featuring beautiful women fall under the genre of ukiyo-e (‘pictures of the floating world’) that flourished in Japan from the 17th through 19th centuries. As only the right character of the two contained in the red seal below the signature points to Eishi, the drawing could have been executed by an artist of the Eishi school, or a painter conceived it in the Eishi style. The drawing may originally have been mounted as a scroll painting.