Art and antiques news from 2001

Timothy Sheldrake’s ... Herbal of Medicinal Plants is often found without a title and with fewer than the 118 plates by C.H. Emmerich after Sheldrake called for, but they have great appeal and the Phillips copy, a first issue of c.1759 with 111 coloured plates, made £5500 at Bonhams.

Early works in ceramics, brass and elm catch the eye at Bristol success UK: A RARE 17th century coffer, made of elm rather than the more usual oak had a pedigree about as good as it gets for vernacular furniture.

The Tin Trunk: Letters and Drawings by Cosmo Clark

UK: NOTED for its wide variety of stock, there truly is something for everyone at all prices at the Summer Fine Art and Antiques Fair, which will be held at Olympia in West London from June 7 to 17.

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.

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.

Showing the Terra Nova at Cape Evans, this large, green toned carbon print is an example of the largest format photographs offered by the Fine Art Society in their 1913-14 exhibition of photographs taken by Herbert Ponting on Scott’s last expedition (this one measuring 2ft 6in x 23in – 75 x 58cm) and it sold for £5000 (Grigor Taylor) in the Bonhams Knightsbridge sale.

Master Pieces by Gareth Williams

UK: Art imitates life in many ways – few stranger than this 1950’s pottery model of a Shetland Pony.

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).

US: THIS Khmer bronze group of the Mahayana trinity, depicting Muchalinda Buddha, Prajnaparamita and Avalokitesvara, c.13th century, 12in (30cm) high, was one of several entries purchased from Nagel in May 2000 by an American collector.

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.

FRANCE: The French provinces continue to be a rich source of high-level goods as proved by the sale of this 1760s table de milieu with exuberant ormolu mounts attributed to the Roman bronzier Luigi Valadier, plus a marble top set with semi-precious stones, to the Paris trade for Fr6.4m (£610,000, plus 10.865 per cent buyer’s premium), in the sleepy town of Narbonne, south-west France, on April 1.

TWO men have been charged in the United States in a conspiracy to sell the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleu, signed by Napoleon and stolen in 1988 from the French National Archives in Paris.

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: AS well as a quantity of letters, journals and sketch albums written or compiled by R.M. Ballantyne – among them an album containing sketches made on excursions to Scotland and fishing trips to Norway in the 1850s, which sold at £1000 to David Miles – the Bonhams (Buyer’s premium: 15/10 per cent) sale contained an 1858 first issue of Coral Island, the publisher’s decorative blue cloth binding slightly worn but generally good, which made £4000 (Heritage).

LAST year’s BADA Antiques and Fine Art Fair was by consensus considered not just the best looking of the association’s ventures so far but it was also, by quite a distance, the most profitable to date for the exhibitors.

UK: Dealers and auctioneers in the worst affected areas have told the Antiques Trade Gazette of their struggle as the trade braces itself for a third month of business blighted by the Foot and Mouth epidemic.

US: IT MAY be 25 years since a copy of the Elegy on Captain Cook, as “composed and and publickly recited before the Royal Academy of Florence” by Michelangelo Gianetti, was last seen at auction, and this 1785 Florentine first edition, engraved throughout and bound in contemporary calf, would also appear to be the dedication copy.

UK: THE PRINTED word and picture, rather than the familiar manuscript and ephemeral material, were to the fore in this smaller than usual Chichester sale, and just edging to the front of the price lists was a copy of the famous 1797 edition of Young’s ...Night Thoughts, as illustrated by William Blake.