Strauss & co - 22 November 2010, Cape Town

36 Marjorie Reynolds was the daughter of the celebrated South African artist, Dorothy Kay, and author of the monograph “Everything you do is a portrait of yourself” Dorothy Kay: A Biography . Reynolds is remembered as an extraordinary woman – a widely read intellectual, interested in the arts and literature and a terrific conversationalist. An unusual person, who abhorred ordinariness, her favourite pronouncement was “Normal is Nul …The very great are also very odd”. She was known to have a keen eye for beauty and was an avid collector of antiques, fine fabrics and jewels. Reynolds was an independent thinker who encouraged creativity. The stones in these remarkable rings were sourced from family jewels and reset into innovative and dramatic designs in the early 1980s. They bear the hallmarks of contemporary international art of the previous decades such as the Pop Art sculptures of Eduardo Paolozzi, or the paintings of Post-painterly Abstractionists like Jules Olitski and Sam Francis. Her substantial collection, bequeathed to the South African National Gallery in 1992 as The Kay Bequest included paintings by Dorothy Kay and her sister Beatrice, Lady Glenavy, as well as prints, drawings and an archive of letters. Marjorie Reynolds