Ceramics

A Chinese export dinner service used in the home of three Georgian prime ministers comes for sale this week as part of Asian Art in London.

This tin-glazed earthenware fragment comes from a once magnificent early Italian maiolica ‘istoriato’ dish from the first half of the 16th century.

Before he started producing his own ceramics in the late 1880s in Paris, at the age of 45, Adrien Dalpayrat had worked as a faïence painter in numerous other factories.

Topping a 360-lot, £242,000 single-owner collection of Martinware and Moorcroft at Kingham & Orme (23% buyer’s premium) was a Robert Wallace Martin grotesque bird.

A recent sale at Byrne’s (17.5% buyer’s premium) in Chester included 22 lustre wares by the Staffordshire art potter and chemist Bernard Moore.

Robert Aronson runs Dutch family business Aronson Anitquairs, which launched in 1881 and today specialises in Delftware.

The most desirable of the varied wares produced by the small ceramics factory established by Vilmos Zsolnay (1828-1900) in the south-west Hungarian town of Pecs are those created after the 1890s.

The Decades of Design sale at Fieldings (24% buyer’s premium inc VAT) in Stourbridge on October 15-16 included 52 works from the family of Albert Wainwright (1898-1943). He was a Castleford artist who trained at the Leeds School of Art in 1914.

A number of six-figure prices for rare and interesting items were achieved when French auction house Rouillac (24% buyer’s premium inc VAT) staged its 32nd Garden Party sale.

More than 700 lots of Decorative Arts and Design spanning the 19th through to the early years of this century were offered for sale by Woolley & Wallis (25/12% buyer’s premium) in Salisbury over two days.

This William de Morgan six-tile panel from c.1880 will feature in a two-day sale, Decorative Arts: Design since 1860, at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh on November 2-3.

The Tavistock Pannier Market may well see an influx of sleeper-hunters following the canny purchase in June of a piece described as ‘a Cornish tile’.

A large 13th century Persian lustre tile sold for £80,000 (plus 25% buyer’s premium) at John Nicholson’s in Haslemere.

Brought back to England by 19th century travel writer Richard Ford, a carved alabaster relief of the Madonna watching over Christ was the outstanding lot from a Gloucestershire country house offered at Mallams Cheltenham (22.5% buyer’s premium).

The 'Indian Sporting' series is the most celebrated of all Spode blue and white transfer-prints. This multi-scene pattern (there are 17 different designs in total) is based on aquatints by Samuel Howitt from 'Oriental Field Sports, Wild Sports of the East' by Captain Thomas Williamson, published in 1807.

Pre-emption, the right of a French museum or institution to step in at the fall of the gavel to claim a lot at auctions staged in France for purchase at the hammer price, is a common occurence in such sales.

Coadestone urns to this design were a personal favourite of company founder Eleanor Coade herself.

Estimated at £7000-10,000, this very rare Bow model of a red squirrel, c.1760-65, sold for £20,000 at Bonhams’ (27.5/25% buyer’s premium) Fine Ceramics and Glass sale in Knightsbridge on September 29.

Two pieces of Moorcroft Pomegranate pattern made exceptional sums within a matter of 24 hours at the end of September. Both were early versions of the popular pattern and dated 1912 – the year William Moorcroft left his studio at James Macintyre to run his own factory in Cobridge.