Furniture

A portable writing desk once owned by George Eliot is still missing after being stolen from Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery.

Scarborough saleroom David Duggleby posted a house record for furniture when a suite of oak Arts and Crafts furniture from the workshop of Cotswold School cabinet maker Peter Waals (1870-1937) sold as a single lot for £31,000 at their latest auction.

The latest Interiors sale at Dreweatts of Donnington Priory included this 2ft 6in (77cm) wide coromandel and ivory marquetry centre or Communion table.

The attics of Camden, Maine, a famous summer colony for the ‘haves and have yachts’ of the Gilded Age, are just the place one might expect to find period Louis Vuitton luggage.

Leading Dreweatts’ interiors sale in Donnington Priory, Newbury, on September 5 is this Indian or possibly Indo-Portuguese ebony, coromandel and ivory inset centre table.

This 19th century metamorphic mahogany estates writing desk will appear at Diamond Mills & Co’s sale in Felixstowe on August 8.

Lyon & Turnbull are to sell the contents of the New York home of Donald and Eleanor Taffner, important collectors of works by the Glasgow School.

A collection of work by the late Sid Pollard, a well-known Yorkshire furniture maker, will go under the hammer at Addison’s sale in Barnard Castle, County Durham, on June 2.

This Victorian achromatic cabinet stereoscope was one of the more unusual offerings among the 540 lots offered at Dee Atkinson & Harrison’s recent sale at Driffield and proved the stand-out seller.

This Chinese export sideboard dating from the late 19th century is estimated to fetch £800-1200 at East Bristol Auctions on May 26.

THERE can be few more instantly recognisable forms in English furniture than the Windsor chair. Since the early 1970s, Michael Harding-Hill has been well known as an authority on the subject, publishing ‘Windsor Chairs, An Illustrated Celebration’, a book which pictures many examples that passed through his hands over many decades as a dealer.

THE Great Bed of Ware is to be loaned by the V&A, for the first time since its acquisition in 1931, to the Ware Museum.

THE two Tiffany works of art that gave strong performances within days of each other in recent US sales were not the usual lamps, glassware or table silver.

THE Oak Sale at Bonhams Chester is not the obvious place to find a 16th century Indo-Portuguese chair. Hiding in plain sight at the January 19 auction of predominantly British vernacular design was a rare survivor.

AT Waterloo, Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) is supposed to have directed the battle from a position near the crossroads of the Brussels and Ohain roads.

MADE by James A. Miller and Brother of Chicago to a design of c.1898, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 18in (45cm) high spherical copper urn worked with repoussé panels of interlocking geometric decoration, shown here, has become an icon of the American Arts & Crafts movement.

JONATHAN Arnold has been awarded an MBE for services to English furniture makers in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

IT is interesting to compare the commercial fortunes of these two similar, but not identical, Mouseman adzed oak sideboards sold at auction in recent weeks.

"The best piece of furniture sold in Shropshire in a decade," enthused Shrewsbury auctioneer Jeremy Lamond of Halls.

THE Cecil Higgins Art Gallery & Bedford Museum have secured this unique piece of furniture at a price of £850,000.