The Neville connection is of special interest because it makes it the second such estate to be offered in recent times which has eluded the major art and antique auction houses and with which the auction world's golden boy coincidentally was very familiar.
It will follow only two months after the last of the sales by Young's in its rooms in East Hawthorn of the collection of Melbourne dealer Richard Berry. The sale continues to define the end of an era in the Australian saleroom foreshadowed by Healy's own death three years ago.
Friends of Kingston say the collection has eluded the major auction houses - despite acute shortage of fresh stock - because Kingston like Healy enjoyed such sales hugely. They brimmed with surprises and the ever present promise of serendipity.
Marjorie Kingston, who died in January at the age of 90, and Neville shared a friendship based on the mutual love of cats and also in his knowledge that she was interested in the work of New Zealand artist William Watkins.
They also reminisced about London and particularly the area of Chelsea which she loved.
Healy found for her a painting of four cats playing by the European artist, 'D Nowein' and whilst of small value it is well executed and the cats are really alive, which appealed to both of them.
Another cat piece in the collection is a rather beautiful, but simply crafted green bowl with moulded cats surrounding it, dated 1940 by the potter Klytie Plate.
Healy was celebrated for his very good eye for art but Kingston evidently was a woman who also knew what she liked.
Her buying was very decisive and helped in her later years by studying a fine arts degree at Melbourne University.
But there was another mentor, Melbourne dealer Joseph Brown, from whom she started buying in the early 1970s. About 80 of the nearly 120 paintings in the sale came from Brown.
These represent the main value of the $800,000 to $1.4 million estate, although the sale will also include antique furniture bought from leading Melbourne dealerships such as Francis Dunn and Kent Antiques.
Receipts and the very catalogues from which she bought some of her art works will be available with the purchases. They look very historic with $1500 for a Carrick Fox flower market study in 1973 now typically unbelievable. Brown also used to give her a 10 per cent discount for being "a very good customer."
The purchases were often modest in price, but select. One of her first purchases from Brown was a still life entitled Peaches, by the colonial artist William Buelow Gould in 1972.
From then on she would buy one or two from every second or third of Brown's thrice yearly exhibitions.
The purchases included works by amongst other, Frederick McCubbin, Sydney Long, Henry Fullwood, Robert Johnson, William Dobell, john Glover, and, of course, being a devoted client of Brown, John Peter Russell.
A Louis Buvelot watercolour of a Swiss landscape was bought at an estate house sale held by Blackburn and Lockwood in October, 1964.
Two works should command particular attention, one by the 19th century master of cat paintings, Carl Kahler, the world's most expensive cat painter - more expensive even than Louis Wain who went mad painting them, the other, one of two Carrick Fox's.
Painting a portrait of 80 cats into a giant canvas for which $US1.5 million eight years ago was unsuccessfully asked at a US auction, must have driven Kahler close to the edge.
How did he get them all to sit still?
The painting in the coming auction is Episcopal rather than feline. Titled The Secret, it was one of the last additions to the collection being bought at Christie's in Melbourne in November 2000.
The setting for The Secret, the Victorian narrative painting is the Episcopal palace at Heilbronn Austria where Kahler enjoyed princely patronage. He spent some years in Melbourne but his work has an overseas following.
The painting cost $13,500 which is about twice the price usually paid at overseas auctions for his cat paintings which issurprising - at least to any cat lover.
The widow of Melbourne psychaitrist Dr Ronald Kingston and an old girl of the Presbyterian Ladies College. Her father was a Tatnall, and earned a living managing Brooks Robinson, Melbourne, an upper class gift store.
Apropos of the recent obituary of Major William Spowers: The major, who helped set up Christie's in Australia in 1969, stayed in Melbourne at a small outer city motel.
Healy 's first big celebrated deals were done there, where for many years he was the janitor. His interest in art was fired by his chats with the London auctioneer.
