Lord Alington of Crichel. Napier George Henry Sturt, the 3rd Baron Alington of Crichel, was born

Lord Alington of Crichel. Napier George Henry Sturt, the 3rd Baron Alington of Crichel, was born in 1896 and succeeded to the title in 1919. In 1928 he married Lady Mary Sibell Ashley-Cooper, and their only child, Mary Anna Sibell Elizabeth Sturt, was born the following year. Along with the Sitwells, Lord Alington was a founder member of the Magnasco Society, which was formed in London in the 1920s by a group of elite connoisseurs to revive the Baroque style. With its theatrical fantasy it offered an alternative to the pre-war simple elegance and the post-war Art Deco modernism. The Magnasco Society organised exhibitions of seventeenth-century art and, through aficionados including Cecil Beaton and Lord Gerald Wellesley, became synonymous with a neo-Baroque interior style fashionable for that decade. In 1940, Lord Alington was commissioned as an RAFVR officer and posted to Cairo in July, where he died of pneumonia two months later. As he died without male issue, the title of Baron Alington of Crichel became extinct on his death. A Massive Chinese Mottled-Grey Jade Carving of a Recumbent Water Buffalo. Qing dynasty, 18th/19th century, 29.5cm. Carved from an enormous grey-green boulder dappled with darker more vivid and with paler mottling. The beast lies on its side with its head turned to the left which is resting on a front leg. The face has a pleasing contented expression with well defined eyes and nose, and with the horns curling around the neck. The coat is carved with loosely fitting skin through which the ribs and vertebrae are visible. The finely incised tail is thrown over massive haunches; the hooves are all well defined. Provenance: The Hon. Mrs Mary Anna Marten OBE (1929-2010), Crichel House, Dorset. Purchased prior to 1953. Exhibited: Chinese Jade Throughout the Ages, an exhibition organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Oriental Ceramic Society, May-June 1975, Victoria and Albert Museum, catalogue no.396, where it is described as Ming dynasty. Catalogue note: For other massive jade carvings of water buffaloes, cf. Chinese Jade Throughout the Ages, an exhibition organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Oriental Ceramic Society, May-June 1975, Victoria and Albert Museum, no.395 and 397, the latter from the collection of Somerset de Chair. In the introduction to chapter XIX, Large Animal, Ming and Ch’ing Periods, they are discussed as being: ‘among the most ambitious and monumental examples of jade ever worked in China; and perhaps all of them once had their place in the pavilions and various palaces in Peking.’ See also J C S Lin, The Immortal Stone, Chinese jades from the Neolithic period to the twentieth century, pp.48-50.