Furniture, Works of Art & Clocks

Please note the viewing of this sale will take place at our new exhibition venue at Unit 1B, Castle Gate Business Park, Old Sarum, Salisbury, SP4 6QX.

Click here for more details and directions.

Our Spring Furniture Auction has over five hundred and fifty lots of period furniture, sculpture, lighting, collectables and carpets. The sale will showcase a number of collections, including forty-two lots from the estate of the late Marguerite Littman.

Marguerite Littman was an American-British socialite and HIV/AIDS activist. She was an accent coach by profession and worked with famous actors like Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. Her obituary in the New York Times states ‘By all accounts hypnotically charming, Ms. Littman, who landed in Los Angeles mid-century, counted among her closest friends the writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner, the artist Don Bachardy, as well as Gore Vidal, David Hockney and famously Truman Capote, who is said to have distilled that charm into his most famous character, Holly Golightly of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’

In 1986 Littman started the AIDS Crisis Trust to raise funds for AIDS research and treatment which became one of Britain’s most prominent AIDS awareness groups. During this time she was introduced to Diana, Princess of Wales, who was already associated with AIDS related charities and in 1997 Diana donated her entire wardrobe to Littman to be auctioned for the charity. The sale was held by Christie’s and it raised more than $3,000,000 for the trust and other charities.

Lot 319 consists of twelve photographic montages of various charity events that Marguerite organised, including the famous Princess Diana Dress auction of Christie’s, the lot estimate £2,000-3,000. Other highlights of the collection include lot 304, a very decorative French Rococo panel in the manner of Pillement, estimate £2,000-3,000 and lot 338, an Italian porphyry Grand Tour bust of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, estimate £4,000-6,000.

Outside the collection, the March sale also features a wonderful William and Mary polychrome japanned cabinet on stand painted with still lives of flowers, lot 100, estimate £8,000-12,000 and a rare 18^th century Spanish Colonial tortoiseshell and mother of pearl ‘meuble enconchado’ probably from Peru (λ), lot 288, estimate £20,000-30,000 and at last but not least, forty lots from the Geoffrey Chesters Collection of Treen (lot 54-93).