'First, all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that furniture. Then, the Canalettos go': The anatomy of a country-house sale

In 1985, when Harold Macmillan addressed the House of Lords as Earl of Stockton, his typically elegant speech on privatisation was greeted by ripples of appreciative laughter, mixed perhaps with apprehension, as certain peers found too personal an application to his analogy: ‘The sale of assets is common with individuals and states when they run into financial difficulties. First, all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then, the Canalettos go.’

He was speaking amid the decades in which the contents of great and middling British and Irish country houses were being dispersed, sometimes at the rate of two or three sales a month during the summer auction season. The preceding hecatomb of demolitions had been slowed by the development of house tourism initiated by the Marquess of Bath at Longleat in Wiltshire and the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, Bedfordshire, and brought close to an end by the seminal exhibition ‘The Destruction of the Country House’, organised by John Harris, Marcus Binney and Peter Thornton in 1974 under the aegis of Sir Roy Strong at the V&A Museum.

However, content sales continued, ironically encouraged by the ‘Treasure Houses of Britain’ exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, USA, organised by Country Life's late distinguished contributor Gervase Jackson-Stops, which was on show even as Macmillan spoke.

The grandest of such sales were mostly undertaken by Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and there Christie’s had the edge, as the firm had the longer connections with owners and their possessions, which it had often already valued and essentially catalogued over generations for probate purposes. Phillips and Bonhams were active on the next level, as were a number of regional and local auction houses. The great Mentmore sale for Lord Rosebery in 1977 tilted the scale in Sotheby’s favour and had a long-term consequence when Rosebery’s grandson joined that firm and headed its country-house sales department. In 1978, another connection secured the great Von Hirsch collections for Sotheby’s, whose chairman Peter Wilson had been a school-friend of Von Hirsch’s stepson.

Sotheby’s coups in securing first 56 Impressionist paintings from the Weinberg Collection in 1957, and then the Goldschmidt collection — only seven modern masterpieces — in the following year, had already begun the transformation of the art market and set the pattern for the next decades, when American collections were routinely offered in London rather than Paris or New York. Nowadays, many of the greatest American collections still go to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, albeit primarily in New York. At less rarefied levels, however, where the duopoly are no longer so interested, there is considerable choice for would-be vendors. The internet gives smaller firms access to the same international audience. It has become much easier to arrange private sales through dealers, agents or auctioneers and there are also more methods to consider. Selling exhibitions with dealers may in some cases be more efficacious than auctions, a bulk sale to a museum or another collector better than a steady drip of smaller parcels onto the market.

One thing, however, remains constant: trust. People who create, rather than inherit, collections, inevitably come to know the dealers and auction-house staff in their fields, in many cases building up relationships with them over years, and it is still more vital for dealers and auctioneers to foster such relationships. Thus, when the time comes to sell, the collector will already have an idea how best to proceed.

This, of course, works both ways. Will Pasfield of Bellmans West Sussex auctioneers has long experience in this field. He shared the Sir David Tang collection of Asian and contemporary art with Christie’s and, in 2023, he oversaw the dispersal of the contents of one of the last private houses in Grosvenor Square. At that time, he said that his fantasy was to be ‘handed keys to a house for our top-to-bottom attention; making some discoveries in the process and selecting the items for a Bellmans auction’.

He will now have to dream up a new fantasy. In recent months, he has been assessing, cataloging and packing the contents of the crowded flat into which an inveterate hoarder, Derek Duggan (1949–2015), had crammed the accumulation of a lifetime. His heirs are his two brothers, who still live in their native Cork, and, having got to know Pasfield, they were happy to hand him the keys. Despite their faith, however, he always observes his own rule: never visit a property unaccompanied.

Other than a firm’s reputation or personal knowledge of specialists, choice for collectors and executors may come down to convenience of location, in consideration of transport costs. Among other British houses that have earned reputations for handling contents sales are, in no particular order, Lyon & Turnbull, Dreweatts, Cheffins, Sworders, Tennants, Woolley & Wallis, Lawrences, Roseberys and Olympia Auctions. The last now holds regular sessions for property from the estates of artists whose reputations might not yet justify a one-person sale or exhibition, but who are likely to benefit from this process.

Obviously, terms, commissions and conditions are negotiable with more important properties. Sotheby’s had arranged guarantees on all lots in at least one of the modern-art collections sold in New York at the end of last year and it is unlikely that any wakeful executors or their owners would have accepted that auctioneer’s innovatory extra commission on lots that exceed their estimates — which are set by the saleroom. At Bellmans, Pasfield says all commissions are negotiable with the exception of the buyer’s premium.

An operation that stands between auction and traditional dealing is Dickinson of Jermyn Street. Simon Dickinson, who set it up in 1993 with the greatly missed David Ker, spent many years in Christie’s Old Master department, where he gained a reputation for a remarkable eye and visual memory. The business chiefly sells on commission and offers not only expertise and unrivalled contacts, but considerably lower rates than most auctioneers. It points out that auction houses will typically charge a seller 10% to 15% commission and a buyer 26% on the first $1 million. Thus, for a $1 million sale, the total commission can be more than $400,000, a 40% rate, pushing up the price for the buyer and reducing the return price to the seller. ‘Dickinson only charges commission once and at a significantly reduced level, normally between 10% and 20%.’

One of Dickinson’s major sales in 2025 was a Reynolds portrait of Mrs Moses Franks, 1766 — a beautiful example of the artist’s portraiture. Franks is a rare and important Jewish sitter in Reynolds’s oeuvre and her father-in-law established the first synagogue in New York. The sale resulted from a visit Dickinson had paid to an American collection of 18th-century British paintings perhaps 30 years before. He had kept in touch with the owners and, when the heirs wanted to sell, he took the entire group. The firm’s head of research knew that the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama wanted to expand its holdings of British paintings and showed them the Reynolds. It has since re-crossed the Atlantic to join that collection.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026, issue of Country Life.