Читать книгу Antiques Roadshow: 40 Years of Great Finds - Paul Atterbury, Paul Atterbury - Страница 12

During its long life, the Roadshow has made a number of overseas programmes, including several in Europe. Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Gibraltar, Ireland and Malta have all hosted the programme, but it was in Belgium that the Roadshow made one of its biggest and most valuable finds. In February 1995, the team visited the Salle de la Madeleine in Brussels, and it was here that a Belgian couple brought in an album containing twenty-five watercolours depicting life in and around Manila in the late nineteenth century.

The owner’s story was that the album had been commissioned from the artist, José Honorato Lozano by his great-great-grandfather, a tobacco merchant, so that his family, and particularly his children, would have a record of their time in the Filipino capital. As he looked through the album’s colourful, highly detailed and often entertaining images Peter Nahum, the paintings specialist on duty, described it as, ‘a kind of pictorial diary that today transports us to another world’.

Though little known outside the Philippines at the time, Lozano was an important local artist who specialised in this kind of topographical material. Born the son of a lighthouse keeper in about 1820, by the age of thirty or so he was regarded in his own country as a watercolourist without rival. He was particularly associated with the local costumbrista tradition, namely the painting of local views as souvenirs for foreign visitors to Manila. He died in 1885, and so this album was probably produced towards the end of his life.

The owners clearly revered it as a memory of their family’s nineteenth century history in Manila, but they were astonished when Peter Nahum valued it for £100,000, at the time one of the highest valuations in the Roadshow’s history. ‘I am flabbergasted!’ was the shocked response.

At the time, some thought that Peter had been over-generous in his valuation of a set of watercolours of limited interest by a painter hitherto unknown in Europe. However, when the album sold later at Christie’s, it fetched over £300,000. Although extraordinary at the time, this was reinforced by a further Christie’s sale, in October 2015, when eleven similar views by Lozano, entitled Types and Costumes of the Philippines, sold for £266,500.