C.E. Warren advert-SCMP-4 Jan1930.jpg

Interesting advert from SCMP. Did the company morph into some sort of art gallery? Very strange.  Sean

I don’t know about 1930, but nowadays it’s not unusual for companies to allow artists to exhibit on their premises. It attracts potential customers as well as helping the artist. From the date, I would guess that this exhibition at the C.E. Warren & Co. Ltd. showroom in the China Building amounted to Bigazzi’s launch in Hong Kong, before he got his own workshop there.

Wealthy Chinese, such as Eu Tong Sen, who commissioned bathrooms from C.E. Warren & Co. Ltd. might well have been interested in buying a contemporary sculpture. In fact I see from Bigazzi’s bio that he too supplied work for Eucliff. Like C.E. Warren & Co., Bigazzi would later supply interior decoration for banks. They both worked with marble, wrought iron and terrazzo.

Leslie Warren was the managing director of C.E. Warren & Co. from 1923. His younger brother, Arthur, an amateur artist, joined the company aged 18 straight from school in England on the death of their father. In 1928-29 Arthur contracted TB and went to England for treatment. In January 1930 he would already have been in Southampton Isolation Hospital where he died three months later. It would surely have cheered him up to hear about his brother’s artistic collaboration.

Thank you to IDJ for posting this ad, which also appeared on Christmas Day 1929.

Mty only interest is how they were then making a penny. What I know of the company they were sanitrary suppliers = and Warren doing himself very well -  and had a house overloooking Happy Valley and a few pobiea whicj ran on the tracl.....e. Amused to see they had gone into the art business to turn that penny.