By Kate Youde
Living with a passionate collector was both rewarding and exhausting for Johnnie Lloyd Morgan. His partner, antiques dealer Philip Astley-Jones, decorated their Northamptonshire home with an ever-changing array of furniture, paintings and objets d’art.
“It got tiresome when you couldn’t put a glass on the table because there were too many bits of other stuff,” says Lloyd Morgan, a jeweller. “Everything meant something.”
Pieces from Astley-Jones’s collection are being offered by Dreweatts auction house in a 277-lot sale in Newbury, Berkshire, on April 9. Separately, the couple’s six-bedroom Georgian home, which showcased the dealer’s eye for antiques, is on the market with Savills for £2.5mn.
Astley-Jones (who died in 2021) and Lloyd Morgan bought the Old Rectory in 1993 to use at weekends, away from their working lives in London. It is situated on the edge of Aston Le Walls, a village 20-minutes’ drive north-east of the Oxfordshire market town of Banbury.
The pink-brick house provides nearly 5,000 sq ft of living space, spread over three floors, including three reception rooms and four bathrooms. Though unlisted, it retains many original details such as oak floorboards and a fanlight above the front door. The two-acre gardens, landscaped and partly-walled, feature a heated outdoor swimming pool and a loggia.
The couple decorated and “filled” the house — Lloyd Morgan says Astley-Jones used it as a showroom. “Everything was for sale because he was a dealer, but he became not very good at selling,” says Lloyd Morgan. “He treasured his treasures a bit too much… if somebody had come in and said ‘Ooh I love that sofa, can I buy it?’, unless he had got bored of it the answer was ‘No’.”
Astley-Jones was particularly interested in the 18th century and had a passion for chairs; Lloyd Morgan once came home to find 24 in the hall. There are many in the Dreweatts sale, including a pair of George II mahogany armchairs (c.1750, pictured above).
But Lloyd Morgan says he collected “anything and everything”, from clowns’ shoes to contemporary ceramics, Old Master paintings to children’s crutches,Victorian lace handkerchiefs to silverware. “It was all done not on a shoestring but we weren’t buying Picassos,” says Lloyd Morgan. “It was extraordinary. He had this very eclectic taste, which was lovely until it got mad. I said to a niece the other day, ‘would you like a tea service?’ because we’ve got 15.”
A highlight of the sale — To Look to See: Philip Astley-Jones, a Passionate Connoisseur — is a wedding portrait of poet and translator Joseph Champion and his wife Ann Forbes, which is expected to fetch £60,000-£100,000. The oil on canvas work was painted by Scottish artist John Thomas Seton around 1780 in what was then Calcutta, India, and features an elephant in the background.
It hung on the green-striped wall over the fireplace in the dining room at the Old Rectory, Lloyd Morgan’s favourite part of the house. “Having gone to India by ship with her husband, then being painted, [Ann] died at 28 [in 1791],” says Lloyd Morgan. “There’s a sort of innocence in her face, it’s absolutely remarkable. And because my grandfather took his French wife to India… there’s a resonance with that. It’s a beautiful painting.”
Other favourite pieces of his in the sale include the “wonderful” small watercolour study of three monkeys, which hung in the sitting room, and an assortment of contemporary bird-shaped jugs by Anthony Theakston. The quirky stoneware brought character to the kitchen/breakfast room, lining the wooden mantle shelf above the bright blue Aga.
Lloyd Morgan made the difficult decision to sell the house and many of its contents last year, as he wants to downsize. Now, he says his sadness at selling the collection has been replaced by excitement that the pieces Astley-Jones bought will find new homes.
“It’s really weird to say this, but it’s rather like polishing up your children and sending them out into the world,” says Lloyd Morgan. “It’s very strange. They’re going off to new people who will love them, we hope.”
Photography: Savills; Dreweatts
