Larry Mahaffy was a keen buyer and participant in auctions at Leonard Joel over many years and it as an honour and with great pleasure that we now offer furniture and objects from his impressive collection.
That Larry was a passionate collector is readily apparent from his collection overall, but it is the lengths he went to in pursuing this, and in cultivating his knowledge as a connoisseur – so rarely seen nowadays – that reveal the extent of Larry’s passion, now to the benefit of those who will enjoy the fruits of it. His earliest interest in collecting English furniture was in fine ‘town’ pieces of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, good examples of which are offered in this auction, but over the past decade Larry’s interest turned increasingly to oak furniture of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and it is this that now forms the heart of his collection, accompanied by fine some fine clocks of the period and other complementary objects, such as soft paste porcelain, creamware, and pewter.
It is not unusual that a devoted collector will prepare in some form or other a catalogue of his or her collection, but it is much rarer that these are prepared with the diligence and care Larry put into his. Informed by his well-stocked reference library comprising the authoritative works in their respective fields (offered as the final section of this auction, lots 151–160), Larry meticulously compiled his entries for each piece in his collection, his work running to over three hundred pages (and still underway and growing before his passing in 2022). But this is more than a mere catalogue – beyond its recording of basic facts about each piece, its blend of careful research and selected excerpts from authoritative sources with Larry’s own comments and reflections make this as much an engaging record of Larry’s curiosity and developing knowledge and connoisseurship as it is a catalogue.
Even more striking as a mark both of Larry’s passion in developing his collection and of his discernment in doing so are the distances he went to in adding to it. All keen collectors take advantage of opportunities to add to their collections, especially in acquiring pieces dispersed from other well-regarded collections, but as a collector principally of furniture, Larry was much more unusual in buying regularly from good English sources and shipping his acquisitions to Australia. The auction includes eighteen lots purchased Bonhams’ well-regarded specialist ‘Oak Interior’ auctions held in London and Oxford, several of these having good earlier provenance. Other pieces were acquired from respected English dealers specializing in this field, such as Suffolk House Antiques, Suffolk. The result is a collection that includes not only many pieces never seen on the Australian market but many of types and quality rarely seen here.
Whatever guided Larry Mahaffy in his individual acquisition decisions, it seems reasonable to suppose in looking at his collection of earlier English oak that his overall wish was to assemble a representative collection of the principal furniture types of the period, and to do so with particularly good or notable examples. Thus, for example, his superb William and Mary gate-leg dining table (lot 114), while of a standard type and form, is truly exceptional for its striking top of solid burr elm top raised on well-turned fruitwood supports. Purchased by a previous owner from Suffolk House Antiques in 2011 (for £15,500), Larry saw off keen competition in purchasing it at Bonhams five years later (£8,125, inc. premium). Larry’s enjoyment of English furniture and objects was not simply in admiring these pieces as a whole but in appreciating the crafts and materials involved; in his catalogue he carefully records both primary and secondary woods and other materials used in each piece, together with details of construction. It seems likely that a large part of his appreciation of his gate-leg table was in imagining its artisan maker’s process in selecting and what must have been a very large burr (a malformed outgrowth on a tree’s trunk, filled with highly-figured knotty wood) and then working it to make the table.
Other pieces in his collection, together with his notes on these, reflect Larry Mahaffy’s interest in the evolution of certain types, such as the progression from the chest (or ‘coffer’) of boarded construction (the boards simply nailed together) of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century (lot 31) to the adoption and spread of joined construction for the same form (lots 29, 36, and 138) and on to the development of the chest of drawers from the mid-seventeenth century (lot 34 and 111). While coffers are not rare in the Australian market, those in the Mahaffy collection are all notably good examples, while lot 34 is a fine example of a Charles II part-enclosed chest, a form rarely seen in Australia, purchased in Bonhams’ 2014 auction of the Douglas collection (£4,375, inc. premium). Equally fine as an example of its type is the Charles II press cupboard (lot 26) also purchased at Bonhams in 2014 (£6,250, inc. premium) and, in a different category, the particularly good Charles II hanging cupboard (lot 118) purchased from Suffolk House. Another aspect of early English (and Welsh) furniture that Larry clearly enjoyed exploring are regional variations, again carefully considered and recorded in his catalogue, and pursued in his acquisition of distinctive regional types such as the early Welsh dresser (lot 116), also from Suffolk House.
It is the auctioneer’s task in offering a single-owner collection to do so in a way that tells and celebrates the different story of each collection. Here, that task is not difficult for Larry Mahaffy’s collection clearly speaks for itself of the intellectual curiosity, the passion, and the discernment which created it, and of the way it has been enjoyed in the perfectly matched setting of the half-timbered and panelled rooms of Larry and Anna’s 1920s English Arts and Crafts-style house where it will remain for pre-auction viewing of the collection.
By David Parsons, Head of Private Estates & Valuations, Decorative Arts Specialist
September 2024