Art and antiques news from 2001

A RECORD turnout on July 13 gave the Hampshire auctioneers Jacobs & Hunt reason to hope that the market is finally beginning to perk up although it was more specialist items, rather than general furniture, which were of most interest.

The estate of the widow of Professor H.B. Acton, a former Professor of Philosophy at Edinburgh University, provided the Scottish and Cumbrian auctioneers Thomson Roddick & Medcalf (15% buyer’s premium) with an attractive group of 20 Modern British lots to put before bidders at The Royal Scots Club in Edinburgh on July 25.

After 15 years of holding picture sales at Billingshurst, Sotheby’s (20/15/10% buyer’s premium) will, from December this year, be holding all their mid-range art auctions in their new saleroom at Olympia.

AS dealers and collectors of antique arms and armour converged on London to do battle in the salerooms of Christie’s and Bonhams a skirmish was taking place 50 miles away in the Oxford salerooms of Phillips (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) on July 18, where a field of 245 lots included these two members of the East Kent Regiment.

AMONG the earlier travel books in the June 14 sale held by Pacific Book Auctions was a 1632 first edition of Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s famous first-hand account of the conquest of Mexico, Historia Verdadera de la Conquesta de la Nueva-España. An ex-Nottingham Free Library copy in a 20th century quarter morocco binding, it had stamps to the title and other pages and a few other shortcomings of condition, but it is an important work and sold at $5000 (£3625).

UK: One of the highlights of Christie’s South Kensington’s antique arms and armour sale on July 19 was this interesting Indian-made group, comprising pistols and a sporting gun from the Lucknow Arsenal.

THIS 582-lot sale at Cumbria Auction Rooms on 25 June was quieter than the Carlisle rooms are used to, a fact which auctioneer Howard Naylor attributed to a strong pound and the way dealers are not buying second rate furniture adding: “It’s all down to quality and condition.”

NOWADAYS Antiques For Everyone seems to be antiques for everywhere, which proves that a successful formula will travel. At the beginning of July Fran Foster of Birmingham’s Centre Exhibitions, the organiser who pioneered that formula, for the first time took her fair to Manchester; then from August 2 to 5 she was back at her Birmingham base for the summer version of the thrice-yearly Antiques For Everyone at the NEC.

Written in northern France around 1200, apparently by a scribe called Jacob, this vellum manuscript of Solomon ben Isaac Rashi’s Commentary on the Prophets (II Samuel 22:1 to Zechariah 6:13) is incomplete, but Rashi (1040-1105) was responsible for the most important and influential Hebrew biblical commentary of the Middle Ages and this is one of the two or three oldest extant manuscripts of Rashi’s commentaries on the Prophets.

Judith Miller: The Illustrated Dictionary of Antiques and Collectables. ISBN 1840283378. £30.

Candy Art Pottery by Ian Turner, published by Hillian Press, the Old Brewery, 12 Church Street, Melbourne, Derbyshire DE73 1EJ. Tel: 01332 862629. email: hian@turnermel.fsnet.co.uk ISBN 09539750X. £22 (£20 plus £2 p&p).

Probably written within a generation of the death (in 1279) of the author, Conrad of Saxony, a charming and almost perfectly preserved manuscript containing his Speculum Mariae Virginis and other sermons or texts in praise of the Virgin was another of the highlights of the manuscripts from the Ritman collection sold at Sotheby’s – and one with a distinguished provenance.

The Don Pottery 1801-1893 by John D. Griffin, published by the Doncaster Museum Service and available from them at the Directorate of Education and Culture, Chequer Road, Doncaster DN1 2AE. Tel: 01302 734293 email: museum@doncaster.gov.uk ISBN 0903524295. £35 (£30 plus £5 p&p).

On the eve of the Open Golf Championship every old swinger in the global village pitches up to the series of golfing memorabilia sales held in Chester and London on July 15 & 16.

FURNITURE brought the biggest money at the Northern and Southern branches of (at this point) Phillips’ provincial empire with Leeds taking the honours netting £146,000 from 250 lots against a Sevenoaks total of £100,545 from 886 lots.

UK: CERAMICS expert at Bonhams & Brooks’ Honiton outpost, Lucy Lanning, believes ceramics and glass to have a much stronger following than brown furniture at present – a belief borne out by buy-in rates in the two sections.

Shown right is a previously unknown miniature Book of Hours illuminated by Simon Bening, whose contemporary reputation as “the best master in the art of illumination in all Europe” has remained unchallenged over five centuries.

“Good but second-rate Old Master paintings bought for their images rather than their names” was an accurate enough assessment by auctioneer Richard Kay of the pictures on offer in Lawrence’s (15% buyer’s premium) July 16 sale of the contents of Horsington Manor, Templecombe, Somerset on July 16.

The well-documented English love of teddy bears was the main feature of the June 27 sale of the toys, dolls, bears and juvenilia sale at the Knowle rooms of Phillips (15% buyer’s premium).

Some 15 years ago figurative painter Claudia Williams (born 1933) and her husband, artist Gwilym Prichard, left North Wales to settle in France. It was not long before they made their mark on the French art scene, their work being represented in many shows and each being awarded the Silver Medal by the Academy of Arts, Science and Letters, Paris in 1995.