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From the shopfronts of Biba to the founding of Osborne & Little, the late artist and tastemaker Anthony Little helped define the visual language of 1960s London. As Dreweatts brings the contents of his Chelsea home to auction, Anthony's vivacious life comes back into focus. Join Cabana for an exclusive tour of his London home.
BY EMMA BECQUE | ROOMS & GARDENS | 5 APRIL 2026
The Chelsea home of the late Anthony Little on London's Drayton Gardens © Dreweatts.
In 2019, after a series of strokes, Anthony Little was rushed to hospital. “I saw what was on the other side… and there was nothing there. So I thought I might as well come back,” he told his nephew, Orson Fry, with characteristic bluntness. It is a remark that says as much about his temperament as his survival: direct, unsentimental, unwilling to overstate.
He was, Fry notes (writing in Cabana), “wildly chic,” moving through life in two fixed uniforms: a dark polo neck with pinstripes in winter, a white shirt and cream suit in summer, always finished with white Chelsea boots, made in Naples. He owns 13 pairs. The repetition is not affectation but method, a narrowing of choice that allows everything else to sharpen.
“Drawing came first”, Little relayed. Raised in a river valley in North Wales, he spent his childhood climbing trees and sketching what he saw. Words came less easily. “I found it difficult to spell properly,” he recalled, “but I was not marked up because I could draw… I realised it was my draughtsmanship that was my literacy.” From that point on, drawing lines was a language, something he carries with him, quite literally, a notebook always to hand, ready to catch whatever passes before his eye.
“I would start a drawing with the eyes,” he said. “The eyes say what is going on… it is all rather mysterious.” His interiors, later, seem to follow the same principle, not built around a plan, but around points of focus, objects of note.
London in the early 1960s provided the stage for the artist. After studying at Kingston Art College, Little quickly found himself at the centre of a shifting cultural moment, designing the shopfronts and logos for brands including Biba and Hung On You.
By 1967, his practice had expanded and the artist was illustrating a series of short stories by Guillaume Apollinaire, producing images that were at once dark and yet precise, several of which now reappear in the upcoming sale. That same year, he met his wife, Jennifer, whose family would draw him into a wider social and creative world.
It was through Jennifer’s younger brother, Peter Osborne, that Little entered his most commercially successful phase. “Illustrations were one thing,” he said, “but if you could come up with a strong wallpaper design that sold, you could sell rolls and rolls of it.” Osborne & Little followed, translating his instinct for line into a repeat pattern, and establishing a business that would outlast the moment that produced it.
Yet the commercial never fully overtakes the personal with Fry describing Little as a man who “devours books on classical antiquity, wildlife and botany,” moving between subjects with ease. That habit of looking, gathering, and holding begins to shape the spaces he inhabits.
The interior of his Chelsea home, captured in Cabana’s Portrait of a Home, presents Little’s objects sitting where they have settled, drawn together by instinct and emblematic of his vivacious life. Following his death, those rooms are now being dismantled and spotlighted as treasures discovered by the design pioneer.
Paintings of exotic birds set within classical landscapes sit alongside 19th-century studies. Elsewhere, delicate works on paper, including studies of flamingos, showcase the observational instinct that underpinned Little's creative practice, each piece carrying something of that original impulse to draw and record.
On 12 May, Dreweatts will present Little by Little: The Curious Collection of Anthony Little, bringing together the contents of his West London home. The sale moves between personal and collected, from his drawing desk and a cased pair of his white Chelsea boots to a wider range of works and objects that trace his interests.
Seen together, the objects begin to suggest a way of living as much as a way of working, one in which looking, collecting and making are held in close relation. Fry recalls a man who could speak at length on almost any subject, whose references were wide but whose habits remained fixed. “When I tried a pair of white shoes, that made all the difference,” Little said. “White shoes - I can wear them with anything.”
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The Dreweatts auction, Little by Little: The Curious Collection of Anthony Little, takes place on 12 May 2026 at Donnington Priory, Newbury.
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