Auction Hunter: How My ‘Sleeper’ Escaped

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Earlier this month, Tayler & Fletcher, a North Cotswolds estate agency that also runs a small salesroom, put up for auction a large water-glazed bowl it described as Art Deco with an estimate of £20 to £40.

Only the bowl wasn’t Art Deco, and it wasn’t worth £20 to £40. A photo of the bottom revealed the insignia of the Omega Workshopsa design studio that produced murals, textiles, and other items for the home by bloomsbury artists including Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell during six difficult years between 1913 and 1919. It was founded by artist and critic Roger Fry, and it is likely that he himself cast the water bowl sometime between the fall of 1913 and 1914, when he was learning to pot

Surviving examples of Omega pottery number in the hundreds, if that, and tend to fetch four to five figures at auction; the remains of textiles and furniture can cost many times more. A rare estate sale of seven ceramics last year sold from £3,275 (including fees) for a broken and stuck plate to £26,855 for a small plate painted with red cranes. Other pieces are held by the V&A and the Courtauld Gallery in London.

I knew all this because I had seen, and written about, a nearly identical bowl for the FT last year. That version is collector’s property. david herbert and it is, he believes, one that Virginia Woolf had mentioned in her 1940 biography of Fry: “a bowl or two of that turquoise blue that the man in the British Museum so admired”. This, I thought excitedly, could be the other bowl. He had the same firing cracks along his twin handles and, like his sister, threw rather amateurishly: the shape was a bit wobbly and the bottom was not flat.

Finding a “sleeper,” an item of significant value that has been overlooked or misidentified by a sales floor, is every auction catalog scout’s dream. Meeting an Omega sleeper is not something I expected to happen in my life.

And so, two Saturdays ago, I dragged my whimpering partner out of bed at 5am to drive our dog to Bourton-on-the-Water. We got to the auction room about an hour before the auction started. We didn’t want to alert Tayler & Fletcher that they had a sleeper on their hands in case they later recalled the lot, so we put on a show of looking around the entire showroom: sitting in discarded armchairs, looking at boxes of glassware, admiring a Victorian stool with tattered upholstery.

We briefly examined the bowl to see if the insignia and weight were correct. They were. No one else showed interest; auctioneers were busy examining a watch that had been bid for up to £120 before the auction began to see if they had missed anything. Just wait, I thought.

We agreed not to bid beyond £4,200, but we were overwhelmed so quickly that we kept increasing our number.

The first lots moved slowly, with auctioneers doing their best to scrape together £15 for a pair of Royal Doulton porcelain figurines, and £30 for a four-leaf Derby plate and two matching dessert plates.

“This lot has attracted a lot of interest,” said one of the two auctioneers on the podium as the blue bowl appeared on screen, noting that it had already attracted previous bids of £50. And then the meter began to fly: £1,000, £2,000, £3,000. There were gasps; the bowl was taken to a cupboard. When online offers started to slow around £3,600, I picked up my paddle.

My partner and I had agreed to bid no more than £4,200, which would equate to £5,250 with auction house fees and VAT, but we were so quickly beaten that we kept increasing our numbers. The auctioneers and the room cheered us on. At £5,800 (£7,250 with fees) we fold. The hammer fell and the room erupted in applause.

“We were in awe,” Martin Lambert, who has been working at the auction house for 26 years, said by phone a few days later. “This doesn’t happen very often.”

He told me that the seller “had no idea” that the bowl was from Omega Workshops. Since then, the Tayler & Fletcher team has thoroughly reviewed the other lots the family had shipped; so far, no sign of another Omega.

As sleepers go, this was not a major one. In the past, UK auction houses inadvertently sold a Rembrandt and a Chinese vase estimated at just £100-£150 that fetched £200,000 in a small Suffolk salesroom. With the internet opening up country sales rooms to global audiences, they are happening more frequently, or so it seems. It also means that when people like me see one, they tend not to be the only one. In my case, it was identified by three other people, including an art dealer; it was for a collector who did not respond to an interview request.

In the end, I’m not sure the bowl cost much less than it would have if the auctioneers had correctly identified it. I probably wouldn’t have bid as high a number; A big part of the appeal, to me, was being able to bore people with the “my sleeper” story for the next five decades or so. And the bowl, in a technical sense, is not very good; It is hard for me to imagine anyone in the British Museum admiring its bulging shape and weathered edges. When I posted it on Instagram, a potter friend replied: “lol”.

Still, I keep wondering if I should have bid a little more.

Lauren Indvik is the FT’s fashion editorr

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