Decorative Art

Two major silver collections will be sold by UK provincial salerooms in the autumn season. Edinburgh-based auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull will offer for sale the first part of the Chen collection in London on November 23, while Salisbury’s Woolley & Wallis will complement their October silver sale with a single-owner catalogue devoted to the collection of the late George Petzall.

A COLLECTION of gold boxes that hadn’t seen the light of day for 200 years, a charming collection of novelty silver animals, a good quality spoon collection and plenty else in between all contributed to the highest total ever seen for a silver sale at Bonhams Bond Street on July 2.

THIS pottery figure of a cat is among the rarest of the Cubist-style felines designed by Louis Wain for the Austrian manufacturer Amphora.

Is this the best ever dug bottle? That is the question asked by advertising and bottle specialists BBR who will offer it for sale at The Elsecar Heritage Centre, Barnsley, on July 6.

Christie’s English furniture day on June 18 was marked by the £9m auction of a dozen pieces of top-flight examples and by the 369-lot £13.6m sale of the collection of the late Simon Sainsbury.

An entire day was devoted to glass by Bonhams earlier this month as they offered just shy of 500 lots of English and Continental glass in their Bond Street rooms.

Yet another example of a British auction house benefiting from the craze for all things Russian was seen at Welsh auctioneers Rogers Jones of Colwyn Bay on May 27, when international interest clamoured for this Russian plate.

Stockspring Antiques will host a loan exhibition entitled The Early James Giles and his Contemporary London Decorators from June 5 to 17 at 114 Kensington Church Street, London.

Treasures of the English Church, an exhibition of more than 300 pieces of sacred silver and gold goes on show at the Goldsmiths' Hall in London from May 30 until July 12.

A rare intervention by the London Assay Office has resulted in the wholesale withdrawal of a 124-lot collection of silver bosun’s calls scheduled to be sold in London last week.

Ceramics specialist Ben Williams, who exposed studio pottery forger Jeremy Broadway, has drawn up a guide of how to spot fakes that have still not been traced.

The Harris Museum & Art Gallery in Preston, Lancashire will unveil a new Ceramics and Glass Gallery on May 14.

The World Jewellery Confederation have drawn up a voluntary code as a first step in trying to establish an international standard for precious metal jewellery, flatware and hollowware.

POLICE are warning that the soaring price of metal has led to a huge increase in thefts from gardens, churches and businesses in the UK.

A companion work to an August Bohm masterpiece has bought a house record to Gloucestershire firm Wotton Auction Rooms.

Burglars made off with a large cache of Doulton figures and silver in a sophisticated raid on Bagham Barn Antiques of Chilham, Kent last month.

Kensington Church Street dealer Paul Reeves did a double-take at Sotheby’s earlier this month. As well as curating their March 20 mixed-owner decorative arts sale titled The Best of British, he also mounted a week-long selling exhibition of his own stock under the same title in their Bond Street Galleries.

AS part of this year’s 550th anniversary of hallmarking in Scotland, the National Museum of Scotland are hosting The Scottish Seminar from April 11-13.

It’s not just the London salerooms that are benefiting from the renewed enthusiasm for Russian works of art. The highlight of the sale conducted by David Lay of Penzance on February 28-29 was this late 19th century silver gilt and cloisonné enamel presentation vodka set.

Bottle specialists BBR have quickly uncovered what looks like a scam involving fake coloured ‘Chandler’ cottage inkwells.