Trading places

For May Matthews, the Managing Director of Bonhams Scotland, it all began with a shove ha’penny board. She was onely ten-years old when her family took her to an auction somewhere in the Lake District. She was the only child bidding in the saleroom, but £12 clinched her coveted Victorian game, winning against a grown-up dealer. Since that moment, she has been hooked on the thrill of the sale.

Many triumphs would follow. Just a couple of years into her Bonhams career, she sold one of the earliest known depictions of a football game, by Alexander Carse, for more than £266,000. Then, as Head of Scottish Pictures (a position she still holds), she raised more than £300,000 through the sale of two exceptional works by the Scottish Colourist S.J. Peploe – which was all the sweeter given that the proceeds of the sale were going to Amnesty International.

More recently, May’s skills were needed outside the saleroom. She was in charge of Bonhams Scotland’s move to its new headquarters at Melville Crescent, in Edinburgh’s fashionable West End. She celebrated the opening with the ‘Best of Bonhams’ exhibition, whose displays demonstrated the exceptional depth and breadth of Bonhams’ international network, spanning a Renoir painting and a dinner suit worn by (almost) everyone’s favourite Bond: Sir Roger Moore. “It will be an opportunity for the public to wander in and be inspired by amazing objects, especially those who don’t normally view our fine art sales,” explains May.

The inviting openness of the Melville Crescent building – a bright and luxurious Georgian townhouse, with many original features – was one of the selling points for May and her colleagues. There were two large salerooms at the former Edinburgh headquarters on Queen Street, but the space was mostly panelled off from the public. At Melville Crescent, however, everyone is welcome to come in and browse the exhibition gallery, even if no auctions are taking place.

Still, closing the doors on Queen Street in July was bittersweet. After all, it had been there that Bonhams Scotland set the world record price for a bottle of whisky in 2018. “That was incredibly exciting,” May says. “To see a Scottish product achieve such a price in a Scottish saleroom.” Other memorable lots to go under the hammer there included a print of King Charles III’s painting of Balmoral. And, on a personal level, the building had witnessed many of May’s earlier career highlights, through the sale of works of art that she adored and had put her “heart and soul” into researching and cataloguing ahead of each auction.

This love of history, and her desire to dig deeper into the past, have been constant pillars of May’s life. Born in Sussex, her father was a fisherman and her mother a primary school teacher. Both were enthusiastic Morris dancers. This meant that, when May was a child, every weekend her family would be going somewhere different – a castle, an open-air museum, a car rally – to dance. May and her sister performed with the children’s group, the Morris Minors (folk dancers, like drinkers of craft beer, do love a play on words – and clearly classic British cars as well). She was even once the May Queen: “You can imagine the headlines in the local papers? May, being May Queen…”.

May’s connection with Scotland has been another theme of her life. Her mother’s side of the family are from Aberdeen, and May would spend most of her summers there. Feeling “very at home in Scotland”, she studied archaeology at Edinburgh University. And it was while she was on a dig in Cyprus that she met another student who was already working part-time for Bonhams. “She told me it was a friendly, interesting place, and that they were always looking for part-time staff.”

A few months after joining the viewing staff team at Bonhams, May had worked her way up from receptionist to specialist in the Scottish Art team and later heading up the department. In 2022, she took on the role of Managing Director.

What does she have planned for Bonhams Scotland? First, there’s an exciting programme of auctions, with the number of sales in Edinburgh for 2023 already doubled in comparison to last year. The first live auction at Melville Crescent – the Scottish & Celtic Sale – takes place in September, followed by the biannual Scottish Art sale in October (Bonhams is currently the only international auction house to sell Scottish art in Scotland). May has already consigned paintings by the Scottish Colourists and works by Mary ‘May’ Reid, an artist who attended the famous Glasgow School of Art in the early 20th century and became part of the cultural elite. Later this year, there will be a themed auction dedicated to dogs, which will run from paintings to the decorative arts.

Beyond the auctions, May is strengthening the connection between the Edinburgh valuations team – the biggest outside London for any auction house – with the rest of the Bonhams network. “When we foster these links with our global teams across the world,” she explains, “we can really maximise what we already do very well.” To give just one recent example of how successful this collaborative relationship can be, last year May’s team received a still-life painting that the seller purchased on eBay for £40, which turned out to be a work by early 20th-century Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck. Her colleague had it shipped to Bukowskis (Bonhams’ sister auction house in Stockholm) within 48 hours. It made it into the auction, where it sold for the equivalent of £99,000.

Hongmiao Shi is Content Editor of Bonhams.com.

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