Prints

The Gart der Gesundheit is one of the giants in the field. The most important herbal of the 15th century, it contained the finest illustrations of the incunable period and was unsurpassed until the appearance of the first edition of the Brunfels herbal in 1530.

Interior decorators may well be familiar with the work of ARC prints, the Battersea firm based at 1-6 Andrew Place, SW8.Their high quality reproductions of antique engravings of Piranesi vases, Roman architectural studies and David Roberts Middle Eastern landscapes can be seen on the walls of many an antique shop or stand as well as providing a stylish focal point to domestic interiors.

The Impressionist and Modern sales were not the only New York sales last week to smash auction records. Christie’s November 5-6 sale of 19th and 20th century prints brought an extraordinary record price for a single print by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec. La Grande Loge, an 1897 lithograph in colours on wove paper, was an extremely rare and previously unrecorded colour trial proof produced before an edition of 12.

Bligh relics sold as part of the Travel Week at Christie’s, attracted national media headlines, but the most successful of this series of four sales was the Freycinet Collection, which on September 26 raised a premium-inclusive total of £1.57m.

AFTER a closure of some 18 months to sort out some little problems with the lease, Mayfair's Shapero Gallery, which specialises in antique prints, photographs, maps and watercolours, reopens this week at 24 Bruton Street, W1 with a show called simply Cities.

CONDITION is a prime concern in the 20th century print market but occasionally images come on the market that are so rare and so striking that condition concerns take a lower priority – particularly if the buyer has been searching for such a piece for 30 years.

Sotheby’s Olympia clinched the week’s loftiest price for an Asian work when a mighty £480,000 was placed by a Japanese telephone buyer probably bidding against the reserve for a complete set of Ando Hiroshige’s (1797-1858) 120 woodblock prints: The One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.

THE dust is finally starting to settle in the newly merged Bonhams (17.5% buyer’s premium). Those who lost their jobs have long since gone, departments have been reshuffled and on March 27 the last print sale was held at the Chelsea salerooms.

Though not so credited, this coloured lithograph, Grand Prix de l’A.C.F. 1913 (Motocyclettes) has a very Gamy/Montaut look about it. In the literature section of a motoring sale held by Bonhams at the RAF Museum, Hendon, on February 25, it sold at £250.

Buying art as an investment has always been a perilous business. Back in the 1920s during the so-called Etching Boom speculating collectors were prepared to pay hundreds of pounds – ie more than the price of an average London house – for single prints by ultra- fashionable artists such as Muirhead Bone, David Young Cameron and James McBey.

IN 1954 the painter and printmaker, Philip Reeves (born 1931), being interviewed for a post as a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art, produced a letter of reference from the artist Robert Austin (1895-1973).

Exhibitions outside London: Specialist print dealer Elizabeth Harvey-Lee (1 West Cottage, Middle Aston Road, North Aston, Oxon OX25 5QB. Tel: 01869 34 7164) has built up an impressive reputation for producing informative, well-illustrated stock catalogues.

FOR a long time now, Kent antique prints dealer Ingrid Nilson, who is a member of and director of LAPADA, has been a well-known figure in the antiques trade, but in recent years her highly decorative stock has been sought after by interior designers.

Rembrandt the Printmaker by Erik Hinterding, Ger Luijten and Martin Royalton, published by the British Museum Press in association with the Rijksmuseum ISBN 01714126268 £29.99 pb

A DEALER in antique prints has complained to eBay that the promotion of reproduction prints in the antiques category is slowly destroying the online market for originals.

THIS year’s annual International Fine Print Dealers Association Print Fair, scheduled for October 31 to November 4, has been cancelled with the forced closure of the Seventh Regiment Armory to non-military activities.

Recent documentary evidence suggests that the lithographic stones for the 79 plates by Smit and Keulemans after Joseph Wolf that illustrate Daniel Giraud Elliot’s Monograph of the Phasanidae or Family of Pheasants were destroyed after only 150 copies had been taken.

UK: A DOUBLE catalogue of prints, and maps saw many failures – nearly half of the 224 lots that made up the May sale of Old Master, sporting and decorative prints, plus photographs and drawings – but a selection from what might be termed the “better half” appears below.

There will be much more to come on the £2m Lewis Carroll’s Alice at Sotheby’s on June 6, but this week just one of ten recorded prints of Dodgson’s 1858 portrait of Alice Liddell as ‘The Beggar Maid’, which sold for £160,000.

UK: ONE of numerous full-page woodcut illustrations of bridles, bits, etc. to be found in a 1602 Naples first of Piero Antonio Ferraro’s Cavallo Frenato..., bound in contemporary limp vellum, that sold at £1950 (Traylen) in the Dominic Winter, Swindon (buyer's premium 12.5 per cent) sale.