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JULIANS PARK, HERTFORDSHIREAudrey James (1902–1968) was a renowned beauty and prominent member of transatlantic society. The daughter of William Dodge James, the Anglo-American lumber and steel millionaire, and his wife Evelyn Forbes who was known in society even after her divorce and subsequent remarriage as ‘Mrs Willie James’, Audrey was the goddaughter (and rumoured to be the maternal granddaughter) of Edward VII and at one time was romantically linked to the future Edward VIII. In addition to the rumours surrounding her mother’s parentage, it was rumoured that her father was actually Sir Edward Grey, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, the Liberal politician and later Foreign Secretary to Asquith’s government. The James family lived at West Dean in Sussex, which William Dodge James had bought in 1891, and Audrey was the fourth of five children, with three elder sisters and a younger brother Edward James, who was later to become the celebrated aesthete, writer and Surrealist patron/collaborator of artists such as Salvador Dali, René Magritte and Pavel Tchetlitchew. Audrey James was five years older than her brother, and although in youth and adulthood they appeared to inevitably mix in the same social circles, the siblings were apparently not close.Since youth Audrey had mixed socially with the royal family - Edward VII and Queen Alexandra were frequent visitors to West Dean. Audrey was to become close friends with Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who attended a dance she gave in April 1923, just before her wedding to Prince Albert, later Duke of York and King George VI (W. Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, London, 2009, p. 109). Their friendship was to last her lifetime, with Queen Elizabeth, as she became in 1936, acting as godmother to Audrey’s adopted son Angus and Audrey serving as Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth. At Audrey’s coming out in 1920 she was for a short time engaged to Lord Louis Mountbatten, until early 1921. The two remained friends after their amicable parting, and Lord Mountbatten was later godfather to Audrey’s adopted son Jeremy. Later in 1921 Audrey became engaged to Captain Muir Dudley Coats, M.C., heir to a Scottish cotton-thread fortune, whom she married in 1922. Coats had been injured in the Great War and was relatively unwell throughout their marriage, which produced a son, Peter, who sadly died shortly after he was born in 1923. Following Coats’ death in 1927, Audrey met the Chicago department store heir Marshall Field III whilst hunting in Melton Mowbray, near to where she lived at Sibbertoft. Their courtship eventually led to Audrey’s second marriage in 1930, and it was during her marriage to Field that she was celebrated as a great hostess on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as being included in Cecil Beaton’s The Book of Beauty in 1933. The Fields lived at Caumsett, the Field estate on Long Island Sound, as well as at 435 East 52nd Street, New York. Here she mixed with the artists Etienne-Adrian Drian, Christian ‘Bébé’ Bérard, the poet Boris Kochno, Adele and Fred Astaire, and many of the Bright Young Things of the 1930s. According to press clippings from the time Audrey and Marshall Field shared a love of horses, dogs and country sports, but evidently this was not sufficient to guarantee the survival of her marriage to the apparently fiery Field. They divorced in 1934, with Audrey reportedly winning a settlement of $2 million on her 45th birthday (which would be in 1947) and the following year she returned to England with the first of the two sons she was to adopt, Angus, to whom she gave her maiden name James. She lived first at Parkside House in Surrey, where Cecil Beaton completed a series of charming sketches, including one of Audrey and Angus, which remain in Audrey’s private albums (illustrated). Between 1936 and 1940 Audrey often visited Paris, where she kept an apartment at 19 Quai Malaquai, illustrated in her private albums, along with many country house stays at Lympne and Trent Park with Sir Philip Sassoon and Sybil Cholmondeley, Leeds Castle with Olive, Lady Baillie, Blenheim with the Marlboroughs and Winston and Clementine Churchill, as well as holidays in Milan and La Pausa with Coco Chanel, Salvador Dali, Christian Bérard and Boris Kochno and in Corfu with the Duke of Duchess of Kent – Audrey being particularly close to Princess Marina (see lots 311-315 in the online sale). In 1936 Audrey acquired The Holme in Regent’s Park and set about remodelling the house and gardens, as published in two articles in Country Life in October 1939 and April 1940. To remodel The Holme she turned to the architect Paul Phipps and the decorator Stéphane Boudin, of the Parisian Maison Jansen. A series of photographs taken by Cecil Beaton of Audrey in the Drawing Room of the Holme show that progress had been made on the interiors by late 1936/1937. It is possible that Audrey Field was introduced to the work of Boudin through her friendship with Ronald and Nancy Tree, for whom Boudin had worked on the interiors of Ditchley Park between 1933-34; Paul Phipps was also Nancy Tree’s uncle, so the choice of him as architect was pertinent. Audrey was close friends with the Trees - Ronald Tree (1897-1976) was a grandson of Marshall Field and therefore a cousin of Marshall Field III, Audrey’s second husband. A visit to Ditchley in June 1937 is recorded in her photo albums, presumably one of many. It is likely that she had also seen Boudin’s famous mirrored dining room for the Channons at Belgrave Square, so the choice of him, as the most fashionable decorator of the day, is logical. Unfortunately much of the Jansen archives in Paris were lost during the war, so a precise date for Boudin’s involvement at The Holme is difficult to pin down, but evidence would suggest 1937 as being most likely. The Maison Jansen dining-chairs in the Dining Room created by Boudin for her bear the cypher AEF – for Audrey Evelyn Field (as opposed to James, her maiden name, or Pleydell-Bouverie) – suggesting that that room was complete before her third marriage, rather than circa 1939-40 as has been suggested. The rooms that Audrey created with Boudin should be rightly celebrated. The Dining Room, Drawing Room, Morning Room, Library and Ballroom at the Holme were amongst the most elegant Regency Revival rooms created by Jansen at the time, fusing furniture from early 19th Century England, France and Italy in what one could term the ‘Vogue Regency’ style. These rooms were a delicate palette of white, grey, pink and cream – intended no doubt in part to complement her art collection. She was a collector of French Impressionist paintings and although her collection did not extend to the size of that of her younger brother Edward James, later in life she was to serve as a trustee of the Tate, where her Impressionism collection was exhibited in 1954, including the Renoir (lot 20) and Boudin (lot 19) included in this sale. Works of art and furniture were bought from the country house sales of great noble families that abounded at the time, including the Dukes of Northumberland at Syon and the Earls of Jersey at Middleton Park. The theatricality of the Vogue or ‘Hollywood’ Regency took on a literal sense in the console tables and gilded wall-carvings from the Dining Room at the Holme (later in the Music Room at Julians), which had been in the foyer of the Teatro della Scala in Milan (lots 42-47). Overall the effect was extremely successful – balancing important paintings and antique furniture with whimsical and decorative items – a reflection of her very good taste.In September 1938, Audrey married the Hon. Peter Pleydell-Bouverie (1909-1981), youngest of the 10 children of the 6th Earl of Radnor. At the outbreak of war in September 1939 the Pleydell-Bouveries gave the house over to the Red Cross for use as a training centre and hostel, living elsewhere including the Savoy Hotel between 1941 and 1942. In July 1940 Audrey’s sons, Angus and Jeremy, were evacuated to Canada, by ship from Liverpool to Montreal. As luck had it the house was hardly blitzed and the contents seemed to have survived intact. The publication of a further series of Country Life articles on the collection in 1947 – this time of Julians Park in Hertfordshire, which Audrey had bought in 1940 – shows that much of the contents of the Holme were transported to the country. Audrey kept various bases in London, including Hobart Place in 1945, 4 Buckingham Place in 1947, following her divorce from Peter Pleydell-Bouverie in 1946, 48 Berkeley Square from 1952-1962 (where some items from Julians were temporarily installed, as shown in a series of photographs from 1954), and Thurloe Lodge in South Kensington, from 1962 until her death in 1968, but Julians was the main family home for Audrey and her two sons.Boudin was involved in the decoration of Julians and modernising it from the taste of the previous incumbent Colonel Reginald Cooper, from whom Audrey had bought the house. Julians had been originally built in circa 1605, a fairly typical Jacobean brick gabled house, and was redesigned in Palladian form in stone in the early 18th century under the ownership of Adolphus (d. 1732) and Penelope Metekerke (d. 1746). The house was remodelled by Colonel Cooper in 1937, who retained the spirit of the early Georgian interiors, but in substance retained only the dining room and staircase of the earlier house. Audrey updated the decoration to suit her own tastes and collection but largely kept Colonel Cooper’s rooms as they were, with some internal architectural adjustments to the entrance hall/drawing room and music room. Items were bought and sold from the collection – including many of the Impressionist works she exhibited in 1954 – and the interiors were enhanced with new purchases in the 1950s and 1960s rather than dramatically changed, including the beautiful George III rococo overmantel mirror that was installed over the chimneypiece in the music room (lot 40), bought from the Hambro sale in 1961. Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie’s legacy was brilliantly continued by Captain and Mrs Jeremy James, who maintained and sustained the original vision of Audrey and Boudin, whilst lending it their own unique aesthetic.AW
THREE WORCESTER PORCELAIN BLUE-SCALE-GROUND CABBAGE LEAF-MOULDED JUGS
CIRCA 1770, BLUE PSEUDO-CHINESE FRET MARKS
Details
THREE WORCESTER PORCELAIN BLUE-SCALE-GROUND CABBAGE LEAF-MOULDED JUGS
CIRCA 1770, BLUE PSEUDO-CHINESE FRET MARKS
Each with mask spout and scroll handle, decorated with gilt scroll bordered mirror-shaped panels of exotic birds with bright plumage and scattered insects
The largest: 11½ in. (29.2 cm.) high
CIRCA 1770, BLUE PSEUDO-CHINESE FRET MARKS
Each with mask spout and scroll handle, decorated with gilt scroll bordered mirror-shaped panels of exotic birds with bright plumage and scattered insects
The largest: 11½ in. (29.2 cm.) high
Provenance
Acquired by Mrs Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie by 1954 (photographed in her London house, 48 Berkeley Square, in 1954).
Brought to you by
Amelia Walker
Director, Specialist Head of Private & Iconic Collections