Art and antiques news from 2002

Anyone looking at this small 19th century still life painting, right, for the first time could be forgiven for rubbing their eyes with disbelief to hear that East Sussex auctioneers Gorringe’s (15% buyer’s premium) had allocated it an estimate of £20,000-30,000 at their January 29-31 sale in Lewes.

Rise of Winifred Nicholson goes on apace with amazing bid of £100,000 for portrait of Ben: Over the last two or three years Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981), the first wife of Ben Nicholson, has become an increasingly significant figure in the Modern British market, culminating in the record £52,000 paid last July at Phillips for one of her trademark window still lives.

Buying art as an investment has always been a perilous business. Back in the 1920s during the so-called Etching Boom speculating collectors were prepared to pay hundreds of pounds – ie more than the price of an average London house – for single prints by ultra- fashionable artists such as Muirhead Bone, David Young Cameron and James McBey.

UK: Thornhill Galleries are a 120-year-old British company that specialise in architectural antique interior design. They make panelled rooms on commission in antique pine and seasoned hardwood and carry a wide stock of period fireplaces and accessories, garden statuary and other architectural features.

Pictured right is one of Twelve Angels, 9ft 10in (3m) high towering chairs made of dried branches that look like sinuous dancers. They are the work of Polish designer Dorota Koziara and three of these are among the more striking furniture forms to be found in CDA 2002, the 6th annual exhibition of Contemporary Decorative Arts and Design that opens at Sotheby’s Bond Street Galleries on February 20 and runs until March 1.

The Wiltshire rooms Woolley & Wallis usually hold four specialist carpet sales a year but a fifth was squeezed in before the scheduled Valentine’s Day event, and with a 77 per cent rate and £77,000 total on the 284 lots on offer, the decision by specialists June Barrett and Ian Bennett was more than justified.

The Ticktum Collection by Colin Ticktum, published by the Ticktum Charitable Trust, Elwyn House, Cow Hill, Norwich NR2 lEZ. ISBN 095413809 £25 plus £3.50 p&p.

Christopher Gilbert: Selected Writings on Vernacular Furniture 1966-98, published by the Regional Furniture Society, price £20 plus postage and available from The Membership Secretary, The Regional Furniture Society, 12 Swan Street, Sible Hedingham, Essex, CO9 3HP. See also the society’s Website at www.regionalhistorysociety.com for details of back issues of the society’s journals.

A privately sourced collection of jewellery boosted this first dispersal of the year in these Hampshire rooms at George Kidner on 9 January – “the bulk of the rest of the material was just good stock pieces”, said auctioneer Andrew Reeves.

Continental Church Furniture in England: A Traffic in Piety, by Charles Tracy, published by Antique Collectors’ Club. ISBN 185149376 £50 hb

THIS first sale of the new year at the Staffordshire rooms Richard Winterton attracted a number of new buyers who were all in the area for the LAPADA fair at the nearby Birmingham NEC.

Antiques Shops, Fairs and Auctions 2002, published by Mitchell Beazley, ISBN 1840005696. £12.99

The most recent of the three annual Olympia fairs, the Spring Fine Art and Antiques Fair, which runs at the West London exhibition halls from February 26 to March 3, is a mix of traditional and modern very much with the decorator in mind.

Pierre Bergé, president of Yves St-Laurent Haute Couture, has withdrawn from the race to acquire control of Drouot Holding SA. The company, which is owned by Paris’s 110 commissaires-priseurs, controls the Hôtel Drouot and the lucrative auction weekly, the Gazette de l’Hôtel Drouot.

London’s first costume and textile sale of the year took place at Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) at the end of January, the 318 lots netting just over £150,000 with an 87 per cent take-up by lottage, 89 in money.

THE Antique Collectors’ Club have published the results of their Annual Furniture Index, which shows a seven per cent rise for 2001. The index now stands at 3575, its highest point ever, from a base of 100 in 1968.

USA: A NEW auction house specialising in what it dubs ‘Landmark’ sales of arms and armour has risen in San Francisco from the ashes of the former top management team of Butterfield’s.

FLORIDA-based organiser David Lester launches his first New York fair next autumn with a broad-based event at the Jacob Javits Center from September 10 to 15.

France has taken the first step towards adopting Unidroit, which enforces strict controls on the restitution of stolen art. On January 29 a first reading of the bill ratifying the convention was adopted by the Assemblée Nationale (lower-house).

The London art market received a major lift in the salerooms last week when Sotheby’s and Christie’s attracted remarkably strong levels of international demand for their February round of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary auctions.