Large numbers of lots identified only as folders, boxes and albums full of prints, watercolours, maps and so on offered in a Brightwells (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale of July 5 included one disarmingly catalogued, in full, as ‘Sketches, Watercolours, Prints of Naked Ladies, chiefly’. It sold at £500.
The lot that caught my eye, however was a five volume work called État général des tapisseries de la manufacture des Gobelins…1600-1900, in rubbed gilt tooled leather bindings featuring fleurs de lys, which sold for £1150.
Compiled by Maurice Fenaille, this, I assume, was the work printed at the Imprimerie Nationale in Paris in the years 1903-23.