Art and antiques news from 2002

A flat annual user fee of about £1100, private access to fresh-to-market high quality pieces, and no buyer’s premiums to pay. A pipedream? Not according to new venture Whozbuyingwhat.com, an antiques Website that is attempting to introduce a new concept in trading in the market.

JUST as the Office of Fair Trading seemed to be making progress over the misleading marketing tactics of the Barcelona-based European City Guide, another similar operation has struck again.

LONDON dealers Mallett are reported to have rejected a takeover bid by property speculator Jack Petchey, who recently bought a 19.28 per cent stake in the company at 210p per share.

A veteran of golfing sales, Bob Gowland has been involved in this specialist field for the past 30 years. With stints at both Phillips and Bonhams under his belt, he has been acting independently for the past 18 months as Bob Gowland International Golf Auctions.

Princess Soraya’s father Khalil lived for much of the 1920s in Germany, where he married Soraya’s Russian-born mother Eva Karl in 1926. Soraya was born in Ispahan in 1932, but lived in Germany until she was five, returning to Iran in 1937.

Butterfields, the San Francisco auctioneers, who made the national press in March following the controversy over a Malcolm X archive, were front page material again in June following the sale of the only surviving parts from the atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima.

This quartet of Meissen white figures from Augustus the Strong’s Japanese Palace was a centrepiece of the June 13 evening sale from Longleat, contributing £2.9m to the overall total.

One of the more curious sections of Sotheby’s sale at Billingshurst on 21-22 May was devoted to natural, rather than man-made statuary.

Following hot on the heals of a gold cased pocket watch which took £25,000 Sherborne auctioneers Charterhouse (15% buyer’s premium) found further horological success on May 31 with this early 19th century carriage clock, right.

Brown furniture has proved hard to shift at auction in recent months but the success of this George I burr walnut chest on stand offered at the Bristol Auction Rooms on June 18 may signal the tide is turning.

USA: THE West Coast of the United States is beefing up its auction presence with the opening of a new auction house in the San Francisco Bay area in August.

Helped by a £17.425m grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund – the largest sum it has ever given – the National Trust announced last week that it had bought Tyntesfield, a Victorian neo-gothic country house near Bristol.

A CAMPAIGN to change the law could force the closure of antiques fairs that are currently allowed to operate without planning permission. The Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) is targeting its initiatives at car boot sales, motorsport meets and clay pigeon shooting, but the proposed change would embrace antiques events too.

FELLOWS and Sons, the Birmingham auctioneers, have refunded the buyers of three watercolours sold as the work of Prince Charles last week after the pictures were revealed as forgeries.

MUSIC makers, from Jaques Frères musical boxes to Würlitzer juke boxes, make their sometimes surprising mark at auction but although this German orchestrion, right was one of the most unusual pieces to come up at any English rooms, Market Harborough auctioneers Gildings (12.5% buyer’s premium) recognised it as a major money maker in their May 28 sale.

A new auction record for any antiquity was set at Christie’s last week on June 13 when the 5ft 3in (1.6m) high ancient Roman marble statue of Venus, pictured right, sold for £7.2m.

Back on April 9 and 10 Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) Bond Street rooms offered a double helping of portrait miniatures on consecutive days: a 165-lot single owner and a 133-lot mixed-vendor sale, both of which saw around three-quarters of their contents get away.

THIS most unusual looking beast is expected to be the star lot at a sale to be held in Paris on July 4 at a most unusual location, the pagoda-like Maison Chinoise, rue de Courcelles, Paris 8.

On the same day that Christie’s King Street rooms were offering pieces from the upper-crust end of the portrait miniatures and vertu market, their South Kensington (17/510% buyer’s premium) rooms had a more bread-and-butter selection of the same material.

Jean Goulden (1878-1947) was another name restored to pre-eminence at the Tajan sale on 28 May. Goulden belonged to the Groupe Dunand–Goulden–Jouve–Schmied and himself underwrote the exhibitions the group staged annually at the Galerie Georges-Petit in Paris from 1921 to 1933.