The brilliant bohemian adored by Maggi Hambling and Marianne Faithfull
Sotheby’s is selling some property for Marianne Faithfull in its Popular Culture auction this month. Here, among bundles of old photographs, movie posters, manuscripts and designer clothes is a painting of an empty miniature bottle of rum and a bunch of wilting carnations by Maggi Hambling. Its title is Thames Walk, Battersea Park, and it is dated 2000. So, what is it about and how did it come to be in a famous pop star’s collection?
While being a still life, it is more of a memento mori, a “portrait” of a woman both Marianne and Maggi held dear – the wild, handsome, big-hearted, bohemian bombshell Henrietta “Hen” Moraes, who was the subject of some of Francis Bacon’s best paintings. The date, 2000, is significant as Hen had died a year earlier.
My take on the painting and its owner goes back to 1976, when Marianne invited me to tour Ireland with her as a musical director of sorts for her comeback and celebration of her record Dreamin’ My Dreams going to No 1 in the Irish charts. With us we took Marianne’s old friend Henrietta as a trusty companion, inspiration and entertainer.
At the time, Hen was staying with Marianne in Regent’s Park in a flat belonging to Daniel Topolski, son of the artist Feliks, Oxford boat crew coach and general man about town. Within days, we set off for Dublin via the second-hand bookshop Richard Booth’s Hay Castle in Wales, where we spent a riotous night imbibing the finest claret by a huge Norman fireplace.
Once settled in Dublin, we chose a backing band and set about rehearsing. We were assigned a formidable minder/driver/cash collector, known in Dublin as Rentokil, with whom Hen established a kind of mutual understanding – much as she had with the heavies she had encountered in Bacon’s Soho. Daily, with blustering wit and bravado, she would negotiate routes with Rentokil to suit our needs, not his, and nightly, supervise his division of the spoils. Happily, the tour was a massive success as Marianne played to packed dance halls and marquees.
However, the Irish high life did not continue back in England for Hen who, after a life of pills and liquor, contracted cirrhosis of the liver. It was then that into the breach of her disjointed life stepped the charismatic, chain-smoking artist Maggi Hambling, who took her under her wing. The two formed an attachment both as artist/model, and as a couple. To paint the same model as Francis Bacon was also a kind of fulfilment for Maggi, and the drawings full of intense energy are, in my view, among her best.
After Henrietta died in 1999, Maggi made this painting following a walk in Battersea Park, where she and Henrietta used to take their dogs, and just across the river from where she is buried. On the walk she found an empty miniature bottle of rum and a bunch of wilting carnations on a ledge which moved her so much she took them home and painted them.
Whatever poignant story lay behind this scenario, it made Hambling think of Hen. The painting was then included in her 2001 exhibition, Henrietta Moraes: Drawings by Maggi Hambling, at the Marlborough Gallery where it was bought by Marianne, who describes it as a portrait. “I love it because it carries a sense of loss and remembrance,” she writes in the sale catalogue. “Looking at it makes me think of her, dear brave, wild, chaotic, funny, heroically self-indulgent Hen. She was one of my best friends, wonderfully warm and lovable, and she had a good heart. She was the epitome of that sort of bohemian life that’s all gone now.”
Marianne has been in a care home since contracting long Covid in 2022, so is dealing with selling off possessions. Sotheby’s estimates her collection at up to ￡70,000. But this painting should surpass its ￡5,000 estimate: Hambling’s market is on a roll. In the auction rooms, her prices have been leapfrogging estimates to as much as ￡70,000. And since the Marlborough Gallery closed earlier this year, Hambling has been working with the gallery’s former co-director, Frankie Rossi, who sells her new paintings for up to ￡100,000. A forthcoming retrospective at Pallant House will do that trajectory no harm. So the odds are that, aided by the special provenance of Marianne Faithfull, this painting is going to perform well.
Charles Saatchi chooses Artsy for the most extensive sale of his life
Britain’s leading auctioneers, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips and a whole raft of smaller live art auctioneers have been dumped by art collector Charles Saatchi in favour of online arts platform Artsy, for the most extensive sale of his life, consisting of 500 contemporary artworks. The first round of sales, which begins on September 11, will include photographs by Richard Billingham who was in the groundbreaking Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997; a 3 x 4m painting of fictional astronauts by Jonathan Wateridge (Saatchi once sold a painting by the same artist for over ￡300,000, or ten times more than he paid); a wall of giant-sized ants by Colombian Rafael Gómezbarros, the likes of which Saatchi has sold at auction for up to ￡20,000, and a ￡2,600 taxidermied horse astride a turquoise blob by Iranian born Soheila Sokhanvari, which featured in Saatchi’s all-female exhibition, Champagne Life, in 2016.
Estimates will range from ￡600 to ￡60,000 for Wateridge’s astronauts, and 100 per cent of the hammer total (excluding Artsy’s charges) is promised to the Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity for children. The switch to Artsy means that, because it is a charity sale, there will be no numerical record of it after bidding is completed. No evidence, therefore, of bullish bidding to boost the market or, which could be a relief for the artists concerned, of failure to sell. Nor, as Artsy does not have a physical viewing space, are there plans for the sales to be viewed in the flesh, though The Telegraph understands that well-wishers are seeking to remedy that. This could, they say, be the last opportunity for buyers to engage with the collection.
Meanwhile, Saatchi, always one to keep the public guessing, has made a separate consignment to a live sale of Modern & Contemporary African art at Bonhams in October. Created in 2013, the untitled roomful of jute coal sacks, sewn together and hung on the wall like an oversize tapestry by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, is one of a series of works the artist made to show how the same packaging material can be associated with consumer and cultural products of quite different values, from coal to works of art. Estimated at ￡30,000 to ￡50,000, Saatchi exhibited it in 2014 and another, larger version covered a whole street at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Other jute sack works by Mahama have sold at auction for as much as ￡70,000.