Previews
Previews
Part of the private art collection of Michael Rand (1929-2025), the art editor and director of The Sunday Times Magazine, will be offered at Sworders. The collection of 19 artworks will form part of the Stansted Mountfitchet firm’s Modern and Contemporary art auction on March 31.
Rand, who trained at Goldsmiths’ College alongside contemporaries Bridget Riley, Mary Quant and Tom Keating, worked at the Daily Express and The Sunday Times in a golden age of publishing in the 1960s and 70s.
His home, a Span house in Blackheath designed by the architects Eric Lyons and Geoffrey Townsend, and subsequent properties, was full of art, objects and books including a collection of artworks and books on the Bloomsbury group.
The March 31 sale features elements of the collection, notably a watercolour and gouache by Duncan Grant (1885-1978) and a woodcut by Vanessa Bell (1879-1961). Grant’s silhouette of two ladies is guided at £2000-3000, while Bell’s cover for Virginia Woolf’s 1921 collection of short stories Monday or Tuesday (pictured here) is expected to generate interest at £500-700. sworder.co.uk*
A signed and inscribed copy of the novel Orlando that Virginia Woolf presented to her cook and housekeeper Nellie Boxall headlines a collection at Ewbank’s in Surrey on March 26.
Boxall (1890-1965) served Virginia and Leonard Woolf for 18 years. After leaving them in 1934, she became cook and housekeeper to actors Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester for two years, where she cooked for celebrities of the day such as Marlene Dietrich and many others.