Art and antiques news from 2001

Buyer’s Guide to Glass by Jeanette Hayhurst. ISBN 18400003618. £19.99. Buyer’s Guide to Pine & Country Furniture, edited by Jo Wood. ISBN184000374X. £19.99.

USA: THE United States government is taking serious steps to beat Internet fraud and is consulting leading e-commerce figures on how to go about it.

Art of Embroidery: History of Style and Technique by Lanto Synge, published by the Antique Collectors Club in conjunction with the Royal School of Needlework. ISBN 185149359X £45 hb.

The Doulton Lambeth Wares by Desmond Eyles is the classic reference book on the products of the Royal Doulton’s famous factory in London – started in 1815 for the lowly task of saltglazing sewer pipes – but the original edition is long out of print.

WILLIAM Blake’s painting God Blessing the Seventh Day is one of a number of art treasures placed under a temporary export ban by Arts Minister Tessa Blackstone.

MAINTAINING their policy of high-content, budget priced sales, the Norfolk auctioneers Keys put up a bumper June offering with a 1540-lot antique sale on June 26 and 27 following a 1236-lot collectors’ sale on June 14. Occasionally there emerges a high-priced star at these antiques offerings but in the quieter days of summer the best bid came for a Georgian-style pedestal birdcage supper table, 3ft 1in (94cm) which sold at £2450.

THE 1140 lots of arms and armour held offered by Birmingham specialists Weller & Dufty (15% buyer’s premium) on June 13 encompassed most forms of dealing out death and sparked enthusiasm from a range of collectors and dealers. But the pick of the day was this fine cased pair of 18-bore flintlock duelling/officers’ pistols.

UK: Sold for £48,000 to Quaritch at Christie’s on June 4& 6 was a recently rediscovered manuscript of William Gilpin’s book on Forest Scenery... (first published in 1791) that fills four volumes and contains 25 full and 20 half-page watercolour drawings by Gilpin, plus three pencil and wash drawings of animals by his brother Sawrey.

An incomplete copy of one of the masterpieces of English botanical illustration of the 19th century, Mrs Edward Berry’s Selection of Hexandrian Plants (1831-34), offered at Christie’s on June 4 & 6 contained only 45 (of 51) of the younger Robert Havell’s partially colour-printed and hand-finished engraved and aquatinted plates, but it brought a bid of £60,000 from the Oppenheimer Gallery.

AFTER Grosvenor House, a number of leading dealers’ next major fair is at Basel – Cultura, which will be held from October 13 to 21 at Hall 3 of Messe Basel where some 85 exhibitors from Europe and the US will stand.

BOUND in contemporary half morocco, one of 300 signed copies of the 1907 first edition of Rothschild’s Extinct Birds, containing 49, mostly chromo plates after Keulemans, Lodge, Grönvold, Smit and Frohawk, went at £3000 to a collector in the Sotheby’s sale of June 5.

UK: A hand-held electronic device which will allow antiques dealers to accept credit and debit cards at fairs and markets has just been launched by Barclaycard Merchant Services. The mobile point-of-sale terminal, which is about twice the size of a mobile phone, will allow dealers to accept card payments in locations where this would have been impossible previously due to a lack of a landline and power supply.

USA: A Philadelphia mahogany Chippendale games table, that represented the discovery of a lifetime for a small Massachusetts auction house, was bought by New York City firm Israel Sack Inc. for a massive $1.2m ($1.32m including the 10 per cent buyer’s premium) on June 4.

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.

A sale of more than 400 lots at Phillips, Leeds on June 5– of which 80 per cent sold bringing a total of £122,000 – gave dealers and collectors from as far away as America and Australia an opportunity to assess the middle range of collectable glass and ceramics.

The Foot and Mouth crisis put an end to the intended group selling of Imperial weights and measures belonging to the British Trading Standards Association. The weights have now been sold over a number of general antiques sales at the Burton-on-Trent rooms of Richard Winterton (10% buyer’s premium) the latest of which was held on May 23.

Garden statuary is now an accepted part of the antiques market, but what about plants and trees? Auctioneers are prepared to sell anything that can remotely be classified as collectable these days, but there is a genuine case for admitting bonsai trees – works of art organic and antique – to the salerooms.

LIKE many other provincial auctioneers, the Bath operation of the Phillips empire – now the centre for collection points at Cardiff, Bristol and Sherborne, profited from the major fairs in June when their 332-lot sale on May 21 saw a take-up of 83 per cent and a predominance of trade buyers buying to sell on in London.

Foot and Mouth continues to ravage the businesses of Cumbria, but local private buyers and dealers had the capital to make a sizeable contribution to this monthly sale on the county’s west coast at Mitchells, Cockermouth.

UK: STANDING out from all the three-figure bids at this 412-lot dispersal at D.M Nesbit & Company on June 13, the £1000-plus results again underlined the trade’s willingness to fork out only on what dealers believe will sell quickly.