Thousands of items belonging to the charismatic Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, from manuscripts of his band’s biggest hits to furniture, paintings and knick-knacks are currently on auction in London.
Among the highlights of the Sotheby’s “evening sale,” which will be followed by two other live auctions and three online sales, is Mercury’s piano.
The Yamaha quarter-tail piano was bought by Mercury in 1975 and was used to create almost all of his greatest songs.
Photo: AFP
It is expected to sell for between ￡2 million and ￡3 million (US$2.5 million and US$3.75 million).
Also on sale is the original manuscript for epic hit Bohemian Rhapsody, whose 15 pages of pencil and ballpoint pen remarks reveal the different directions Mercury envisaged for the track.
It also reveals that it was originally going to be called Mongolian Rhapsody.
Photo: AFP
Paintings by Chagall, Dali and Picasso that adorned Mercury’s home, as well as the last painting he bought a month before his death from AIDS in 1991 — an oil on canvas by James Jacques Joseph Tissot — will also go under the hammer.
AUCTION FAN
All the items for sale are from Mercury’s home, Garden Lodge, in west London. The property’s green door, covered in fan graffiti, is one of the lots.
The entire collection is being offered for sale by Mary Austin, a close friend and one-time fiancee of Mercury’s.
“Mary Austin has lived with the collection and has cared for the collection for more than three decades,” said Gabriel Heaton, a books and manuscripts specialist at Sotheby’s.
Mercury “was not interested in having a museum of his life but he loved auctions,” to the point of being a regular at Sotheby’s sales, said Heaton.
Austin believes the artist — who was 45 when he died — would have “loved” this sale, he added.
Some 1,469 lots will go under the hammer at the famous London auction house, whose facade has been decorated with a huge moustache for the occasion. Many reveal another side of Mercury, including his passion for cats and for Japan — as evidenced by his collection of kimonos and prints.
MOUSTACHE COMB
Mercury’s most flamboyant stage costumes, Hawaiian shirt and Superman tank top will also find new homes along with his personal polaroids and legendary snapper Mick Rock’s shots.
The finest bottles from his cellar, such as Dom Perignon champagne, will be up for grabs alongside more intimate items, such as a book of personally annotated poetry and a moustache comb.
Among the more playful items are a set of games including travel Scrabble, at which Mercury excelled.
Before the sale, the auction house hosted the collection at a month-long exhibition, open to the public free of charge. Sotheby’s estimated when the auction was announced in April that the lots would fetch at least ￡6 million. Part of the proceeds will be donated to the Mercury Phoenix Trust and the Elton John Aids Foundation, two organizations involved in the fight against AIDS. Sotheby’s says it is the largest collection, by volume, of a cultural icon to go to auction since the Elton John sale in 1988, when 2,000 lots sold for a total of ￡4.8 million.
This month the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) announced a new policy ostensibly aimed at influencing the upcoming presidential election. A top-notch Voice of America (VOA) report observed “China launched a series of influence campaigns against Taiwan last week, unveiling a plan to promote integrated development across the Taiwan Strait.” The plan, a “demonstration zone,” offers incentives for Taiwanese to live, work and invest in Fujian Province, across the Strait from Taiwan, along with supplies of water, electricity and gas. Using cooperative zones to poach technology and influence Taiwanese is an old plan that has appeared in various
While participating in outrigger canoe activities in Hawaii, Yvonne Jiann (江伊茉) often heard indigenous locals say that their ancestors came from Taiwan. “I didn’t really understand why,” the long-time US resident tells the Taipei Times. Growing up in Taipei, she knew little about indigenous culture. “Only when I returned to Taiwan did I learn about our shared Austronesian cultural background and saw the similarities.” Jiann visited Taiwan just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down international travel. Unable to leave and missing her canoe family across the Pacific Ocean, she started the Taiwan Outrigger Canoe Club (TOCC) and began researching how
As Vladimir Nabokov revised his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he found himself in a strange psychological state. He had first written the book in English, published in 1951. A few years later, a New York publisher asked him to translate it back into Russian for the emigre community. The use of his mother tongue brought back a flood of new details from his childhood, which he converted into his adopted language for a final edition, published in 1966. “This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a
SEPT. 25 to OCT. 1 Joyce McMillan was greatly moved by the pleas of the Taiwanese pastor and doctor who preached at her church in the summer of 1954. Hsieh Wei (謝緯) had just completed his medical residency in Buffalo, New York and stopped by Berkeley to raise funds and recruit staff for the tuberculosis treatment center the Presbyterian Church planned to open in his hometown of Puli, Nantou County. McMillan, who was a nursing aide, had the dream of being an overseas missionary since she was 7 years old. She also had a close friend die of tuberculosis. She expressed
RSS