Art and antiques news from 2001

The Scillies in one of 49 engraved charts from a 1753 first edition of Greenville Collins’ Great-Britain’s Coasting Pilot... which made £4000 at Bonhams.

The contents and joints are loose and the upper hinge is nearly detached, but the maroon cloth gilt binding of this 1890 first issue of what was only Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four, are pretty good and this copy sold at Dominic Winter for £3000 to Bromlea & Jonkers.

UK: WHEN people talk of antiques as a sure investment a word of advice is always ‘Remember stevengraphs, think about pot lids.’

The growth of the Internet, and the reluctance of the biggest auctioneers to deal with low-value goods, has helped provincial auctioneers win more business.

UK: ONE of eight coloured aquatints, plus map and plan, from an 1816 first edition of Travels in Brazil by Henry Koster, who first went to Brazil in 1809, hoping that a change of climate might alleviate his TB, and eventually settled to the life of a sugar planter at Jaguaribe, near Recife in Pernambuco, where he died in 1820.

UK: Collectors and dealers will get a rare chance to bid for prints by pioneering photographers Roger Fenton and James Robertson, who made their names during the Crimean War, at an auction on behalf of a photographers’ charity on April 26 in central London.

UK: THE market for Arts & Crafts furniture remains a buoyant one as was evident at the February 28 sale held by Dorking-based Crow’s Auction Gallery (10 per cent buyer’s premium), when a period 5ft 10in wide by 6ft high (1.78 x 1.83m) oak dresser with open arched back panel and central bubble glazed door led the way at £1300.

UK: BY the time you read this, the Kent and Medway Bills should have passed into law, with Royal Assent being given on Tuesday, April 10, although there will be a six-month delay until it can be enforced.

UK: AT some auctioneers a sale total of £125,000 may not be a cause for breaking out the champagne, but at relative newcomers Diamond Mills it was a house record and the success rate of 91 per cent was one any firm in the land would relish.

THE 300-LOT postal and online comic auction which ended on March 13 was a complete sell-out and saw a top bid of £2540 for a copy of the first Beano Book (or annual) of 1940, which had a rather worn spine but was otherwise designated vg.

UK: THE extent to which the decorators’ market has become a force to be catered for was illustrated at the 1200-lot Gloucestershire sale held by Wotton Auction Rooms (11.75 per cent buyer’s premium) February 20-21 when this relatively modern Queen Anne-style bureau bookcase led the bidding.

The Tin Trunk: Letters and Drawings by Cosmo Clark

Master Pieces by Gareth Williams

UK: SALES catering for specific collectors’ markets are steadily increasing in the provincial rooms with the Scottish arm of the LVMH empire.

UK: ANYONE thinking of doing a deal on a Turkish picture in the next few weeks would have been well advised to have kept an eye on Bonhams & Brooks (10/15 per cent buyer’s premium) March 28 Topographical & American Pictures Sale.

THREE Scandinavian auction houses – one each from Denmark, Sweden and Norway – have clubbed together to set up a Web presence that they are billing as “the greatest knowledge of fine art in Northern Europe”.

UK: INSET with a portrait miniature, this 1925 Golden Cockerel edition of Songs... by Robert Burns, illustrated with wood engravings by Mabel Annesley and bound in Cosway style in red morocco gilt by Bayntun Rivière, was sold at Bonhams (Buyer’s premium:15/10 per cent) at £1400 (Pirouages).

The catalogue for the Dix Noonan Webb sale of March 21 makes known a recent discovery before it gets into the learned journals. It is an incidental use of sale catalogues that these things can be given prompt announcement. This is the nice example of a Charles I half-crown struck at York.

AUSTRIA: THERE were three prices of over ASch1m (£50,000) at the Wiener Kunst (20 per cent buyer’s premium) modern art sale on March 6, starting with Rudolf Wacker’s 1924 Puppentheater, 25 x 19in (64 x 47cm), a puppet theatre with rag doll, at ASch2.2m (£100,000). The back of the canvas featured another painting, of boats moored in a small marina.

UK: Christie’s are set for a dramatic shake-up of their UK operations with the announcement that they are “exploring a number of options for our future in London including consolidation into a single site”.