The following 6 lots belonged to the late Hugo Morley-Fletcher, the great European Ceramics specialist who worked for Christie’s for over 40 years.
Hugo had his own rather eccentric aristocratic style and sense of panache, which, in combination with his unerring confidence, was off-putting to some, but captivating to others. He was born in 1940 and spent the Second World War in his mother’s family’s ancestral home, Yester, in Scotland. Yester is a fine early 18th century house begun in 1699, and its architecture, plasterwork and contents had a profound impact upon Hugo. His mother was also a talented sculptor, so art was in his blood.
Working with Hugo was, at times, a little challenging, but it was certainly never, ever, dull. He was sometimes generous with his knowledge, but on other occasions would withhold it as a test. Hugo was a fine linguist and was completely untroubled by taking auctions in a variety of different languages. He also had a natural curiosity and deep understanding of other cultures and their history, and Continental clients were frequently surprised and impressed by his knowledge of both their history and current affairs. In cold weather he always wore a green loden that he had bought in Vienna, yet paradoxically Hugo always retained his sense of Britishness. On one occasion, when we were in a tiny railway station in the middle of nowhere in Germany after visiting a client’s collection, we were struggling to get a ticket machine to work when a kindly local intervened to help. He then asked if we had been there the previous year. When we confirmed that we had, and asked why he asked, he replied that he remembered Hugo’s red socks from the year before!
Hugo’s understanding and appreciation didn’t just extend to ceramics; it was wide-ranging, encompassing architecture, pictures, furniture, gardens, to name only a few. He had a prodigious memory, and he prided himself on his ability to memorise the position of objects within a client’s house and retain that memory many years after the visit. He also had the ability to give a summary value of a collection after only the briefest of visits. He had a tremendous eye, frequently cutting straight through to the key points of an object. Hugo gained further notoriety after spending almost thirty years as a specialist on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, and he published a number of books.
Hugo was, in short, a tour de force in the ceramics world. When he joined Christie’s in 1963, at the time the market was dominated by Sotheby’s under the auspices of the great Tim Clarke. By the 1970s Hugo had reversed this. The highly important collection which was sold over two sales in March and October 1977 were two of the iconic sales of the 1970s, making a huge amount of money at the time. These were followed by many others. It was perhaps not a coincidence that he chose to retire from Christie’s the evening after the 11th December 2007 sale, an iconic single-owner sale of Meissen porcelain which made over £3 million, which at the time broke the world record as the highest value achieved for a single European Ceramics sale.
The current lot was possibly modelled after a drawing by François Boucher (b.1703-1770), this model appears to have been made with a few slight variations. See Joanna Gwilt, Vincennes and Early Sèvres Porcelain from the Belvedere Collection, V&A, 2014, no. 155, p. 216, for an example with a tree-stump at the back.