Textiles

One of the highlights of a busy week in the salerooms came at Dreweatts’ auction of the Sir William Whitfield (1920-2019) collection.

While one of the Textile Society’s important functions is holding fairs, another is its annual awards and bursaries, including a professional development award.

This damask towel measuring 3ft 5in x 2ft 5in (1m x 75cm) and decorated with wreaths of fleur de lys and a central bouquet of roses will feature in Osenat’s La Royauté à Versailles auction, to be held in Versailles on April 5.

A UK-based design studio trio last year took over the UK licence to the archive of Florence Broadhurst, an Australian designer whose whirlwind life came to a tragic end in 1977.

The latest staging of The London Antique Rug & Textile Art Fair was marked by strong sales of carpets and fewer big-ticket sales, according to organiser and exhibitor Aaron Nejad.

The London Antique Rug & Textile Art Fair (LARTA) celebrates its 10th anniversary this year on the mezzanine of the Decorative Antiques & Textiles Fair in Battersea Park.

A sale of art and antiques from a Worcestershire manor house included the rare appearance at auction of two examples of Opus Anglicanum.

This rare sampler, just 6in (15cm) across, was completed by a girl from the Queens Orphan School in Van Diemen’s Land (the island of Tasmania) in 1838.

Thirty of the top textiles and tribal art dealers will be exhibiting at the 'London Antique Textiles & Tribal Art Fair' at the Hilton Olympia in Kensington High Street on Sunday, November 10.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

Meg Andrews deals in antique dress and textiles and is a consultant to the Heritage Lottery and museums. She promotes textiles as hangings for interiors.

The National Museums of Scotland has been revealed as the buyer of the Storrar Coverlet – a rare woollen textile withdrawn at the 11th hour from a sale at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh in August.

The Textile Society has run antique and vintage textiles fairs in Manchester for the past 20 years with its annual London event launching in 2009. Proceeds from these 40-plus standholder events help to fund the society’s awards and bursaries.

Private buying dominated as Essex saleroom Sworders (23% buyer’s premium) offered the selected contents of a Cotswold manor house.

Metalware in all its forms played a major part in the development of the Bauhaus and recent sales contained examples in every price range.

Patchworks stitched together by successive generations in poor Japanese communities offered in Kensington exhibition

A north-west Persian carpet in the Esfahan style c.1700, offered for a price in excess of €30,000 by Massoud Milani from Paris, was one of the leading sales at the first HALI Fair in London’s Mall Galleries.

A festival of rugs and textiles organised by HALI magazine joins the busy line-up of London events this summer.

Barry Fletcher specialises in vintage rugs and comes over regularly from Belgium to stand at the 50-dealer monthly Bath Vintage & Antiques Market.

Among the most desirable of all needlework samplers are those associated with pupils at the Ackworth School, founded as a co-educational boarding school in 1779 by the Quaker physician John Fothergill and still thriving today.