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A rare auction with the entire 93 lots coming from a single collection produced record sales totalling £18,91 million ($25.37 million) at Christie’s in London yesterday. On offer was what is known in the art world as the Goodricke Collection, a name long connected with Calcutta and tea, or the Camellia Collection.

Abindranath Tagore’s “The Spinner of a Nation’s Destiny“.

The collection was formed during the 1990s and early 2000s with a focus on the artistic legacy of Bengal and the wider art of South Asia where a UK company, Camellia plc, has its origins in tea estates now managed by the Goodricke Group. The result was spectacular with all 93 lots sold, multiple times above estimates. They included 26 by Ganesh Pyne, a leading Bengali artist, that formed the core of the collection with five tempera paintings along with mixed media, fountain pen sketches and other jottings on paper or card. The collection has been widely considered one of the most culturally significant institutional archives of Pyne’s career.

Christie’s stopped holding annual auctions in London seven years ago but returned yesterday as a one-off because the Camellia base is in Lonon, as are the works – plus of course the attraction of old colonial ties.

This led to the £18.91 million total being the highest ever for the auction house’s South Asian modern art sales in London. Seventeen artists achieved world records, including Pyne on his 89th birth anniversary (He died in 2013).

The record prices were perhaps not surprising at a time when the market for Indian and other South Asian art is booming. What was remarkable was that the auction was not led by the famous Bombay-based Progressive’s Group that began in the 1950s and usually dominates the top ends of auctions with names such as Tyeb Mehta, M.F.Husain, and F.N.Souza.

Damien Vesey, a........

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