Marjorie Paget, Marchioness of Anglesey and daughter of the Duke of Rutland, links two fascinating auctions encompassing exquisite jewellery, photographic portraits and a spy-glass that had once belonged to Napoleon
ONE of the many satisfactions of writing this column comes when it is possible to weave connections between objects in the different sales or exhibitions that I have to discuss. This week, there has been no need for any weaving, as it was unusually easy to make a link between Sotheby’s online auction of property from the Marquess of Anglesey’s private apartment at Plâs Newydd and Sloane Street Auctions’s live Spring Fine Arts sale, both of which took place last month.
The seat of ancestors of the Paget family since the mid 15th century, the house overlooking the Menai Strait and Bridge was passed to the National Trust in 1976, but is now fairly rundown, so much so that the Trust cannot allow the present Marquess, the 8th, and his family to occupy their area because of dangerous plumbing and electrical wiring. There have been previous sales in the 1920s; more recently, a tiara was at Maastricht in 2020. They all resulted from the wreckage of the Paget fortunes by Henry, the ‘Dancing Marquess’, as the press called the 5th incumbent (1875 –1905), who was also known as ‘Mad Ux’ to the family, from their secondary title, Earl of Uxbridge. He had run through the equivalent of about £73 million in five years.
Despite him, there are still remnants of the historic collections in the house, not to mention a glorious Rex Whistler mural, which does not have any of the problematic subject matter of the ones in Tate Britain’s former restaurant. Whistler was in love with a daughter of the house, Lady Caroline, and there were a few drawings and a painting by him in the sale, the most expensive being a set of four 8in by 5¼in wash drawings, The Seasons (Fig 1), at £16,510.
The 1st Marquess of Anglesey famously lost a leg at Waterloo, where he was Wellington’s second-in-command, and his wooden substitute is still there, but the closest connection to Napoleon in the sale was a singledraw spy-glass that had belonged to him on Elba (Fig 5), which was given to the 1st Marquess’s daughter-in-law in 1867. Although in pieces and missing elements, it sold well above estimate for £44,450. A pair of impressively robust giltwood and gesso pier tables with lift-out japanned oak tops (Fig 3) sold for £ 50,800. They have been convincingly attributed to James Moore (about 1670–1726), who held a warrant from George I, and they may have
