Art and antiques news from 2003

AMONG all the specialist collecting areas, few can be as specialised or as fervent as the market in items relating to the Titanic. Devizes auctioneers Henry Aldridge & Son (15/10% buyer’s premium) have capitalised on the way enthusiasts will pay big money for anything relating to the doomed liner by holding two specialist sales a year, in April and in September.

ALMOST all the exhibitors at the giant Antiques For Everyone fair, held at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre from April 3 to 6, arrived with far from high hopes. This was just as well for a good many of them, but not for all.

Topping the sale of fine watches held at Bonhams’ Bond Street (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) rooms on April 15, was this 18th century gold pair cased verge watch. This had a signed and numbered movement (562) by Daniel Delander, who was free of the Clockmakers Company in 1699, and was contained in plain gold cases marked for London, 1716.

FOUNDED in 1990 by Devonshire-based Madeline Marchand, who operates as Fair Antiques, the next twice-yearly East Berkshire Antiques Fair will be held at the Berkshire College of Agriculture, near Maidenhead, over the Bank Holiday weekend of May 3 to 5.

Wimbledon-based Paola Francia-Gardiner, who operates as P&A Antiques, holds two fairs in one this weekend at the Chelsea Village Hotel in London’s Fulham Road when on Sunday April 27 the Art Deco & 20th Century Design Fair runs in tandem with the Fashion for Passion Fair.

Pictured right is the highlight of Christie’s South Kensington’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) first football memorabilia sale of 2003 on March 26. A Cup Tie at Crystal Palace, Corinthians v. Manchester City, by Charles Ernest Cundall, in oil on panel 231/4in x 2ft 51/2in (60 x 75cm), signed C. Cundall lower right, set a new auction record for the artist when it was knocked down to London dealer Chris Beetles for £42,000, double the upper estimate.

HOLLOWAYS of Banbury are set to re-open their doors after a £100,000 refurbishment. The project, which started in January and was due for completion as the Antiques Trade Gazette went to press, focused on improving facilities for both viewings and the sales themselves.

AS the antiquities trade brace themselves to cope with the fall-out of the mass looting of artefacts in Iraq, a UK stolen art database takes centre stage once more. Trade organisations in Britain and around the world have acted immediately to ensure members follow guidelines that will prevent any dealing in pieces that may have been looted during the recent Iraq war.

Illustrated are a pair of ice pails, covers and liners from the Duke of Newcastle’s Derby porcelain service, c.1797, dispersed by Mellors and Kirk in Nottingham on April 10.

Among the miniatures and novelties at Dreweatt Neate’s 2 April sale, there was especial interest in a 37-lot private collection of card-cases amassed over 50 years by an Oxfordshire vendor.

FRENCH auctioneers are trying to build links with the British Art Market Federation to campaign against damaging European Union regulations which are driving business across the Atlantic to the USA.

A private collection of 99 microscopes was the highlight of this three-day sale at John Bellmans. No fewer than nine examples realised four-figure sums, the best seller being a 19th century lacquered brass binocular petrological microscope by Watson & Sons which sold to a private collector from London at £3100.

Two early watercolour drawings of rabbits in snowy settings were offered as part of a Bonhams sale of April 1. That seen right shows one rabbit making a snowball while another leans on a fence, while in the illustration reproduced below right, the two rabbits are building a snowman.

THE status of Sir Kyffin Williams (b.1918) as Wales’s most famous living artist and one of the Principality’s principal artistic exports, was once again confirmed when this oil on canvas, right, Pentraeth, Anglesey took £10,000 at Christie’s South Kensington.

DOMINATED as the Doncaster sale at Wilkinsons on 23 February was by solid English oak, it also had its more esoteric moments in the high-price range. But in fact Sid Wilkinson was rather disappointed in the results on these two very different examples of carving.

Sensible estimates coupled with lots of good -quality material were the key to success at Ross’s (12.5% buyer’s premium) in Belfast on March 5. The 252-lot catalogue, from which 90 per cent of pictures were sold by value, taking a hammer total of £350,000, had something to suit all pockets and auctioneer Daniel Clarke felt it to be the sort of sale in which it would have been “impossible not to have found something you like”.

CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown’s Budget plans to help achieve one of the three main aims of the National Art Collections Fund (the Art Fund) campaign to improve art donation. Concern that art owners do not have enough incentive to bequeath works to the nation has led the Chancellor to announce that he will look at introducing a policy of tax relief on such donations – until now, such relief has only been available on donations of cash or shares.

A JUNE 3 New York court hearing will rule whether Sotheby’s and Christie’s should pay $40m compensation to clients who bought and sold at their auctions outside the US during the 1990s.

THE British Antiques and Collectables Awards have come round again, with judges from across the trade and auctioneering profession singling out the cream of their colleagues for praise.

For a Scottish antique, no provenance is more guaranteed to stir the blood than a connection, however tenuous, with a romantic outlaw. At Lyon & Turnbull’s sale on 26 March the link was Rob Roy McGregor, or at least the cattle rustler’s loyal kinsman and Glasgow magistrate Baillie Nicol Jarvie.