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Art and antiques news from 2004

In 2004 Nicholas Bonham left Bonhams. It was the first time there was no family member on the board in the firm's history.
 
A blaze at Momart's London warehouse destroyed about £40 million of art including important contemporary and Modern pictures.
 
A crowd of more than 800 people in the saleroom watched as Young Lady Seated at the Virginals, a newly acknowledged work by Johannes Vermeer, sold at Sotheby's for £14.5 million.
 

Legal seminars for London

07 October 2004

WITHERS and Devonshires Solicitors, law firms who specialise in art market issues, are sponsoring two seminars: one on art loans and the risks involved, the other on art and the police.

Book for Leeds while you can

07 October 2004

THERE is still a chance to book tickets for the RICS conference in Leeds from October 15-17.

Shakespeare but no will

07 October 2004

“EVERY auction house’s dream” is how Rupert Powell, managing director of Bloomsbury Auctions, described the discovery of a Shakespeare First Folio that will provide a fitting centrepiece for the company’s 500th sale on Thursday October 7.

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You wait years for someone to consign a micromosaic table, then…

07 October 2004

FOLLOWING the Antiques Trade Gazette’s coverage of the sale of a micromosaic table signed by Michelangelo Barberi for £250,000 at Dreweatt Neate’s Donnington Priory rooms in January – still the highest price achieved for an item of furniture in a UK saleroom so far this year – the Newbury firm received a call from a gentleman in Scotland.

Newark to change days for 2005: Fair moves from Monday and Tuesday to become three-day event starting on Thursday

07 October 2004

FROM February 2005, the Newark International Antiques and Collectors Fair, the largest event of its kind in Europe, will become a three-day event, starting on Thursday and finishing on Saturday.

Biennale – £8m gems theft

07 October 2004

TWO diamonds with a reported value of nearly £8m were were stolen from the Chopard stand at the Paris Biennale.

Organisers cancel New Year Monte Carlo fair

07 October 2004

THIS year’s Monte-Carlo International Fine Art & Antiques Fair, scheduled to run December 31-January 6 at the Grimaldi Forum, has been cancelled.

Plot thickens in dispute over Italian glass designer

07 October 2004

THE Venini factory of Venice are to meet with their lawyers this week to discuss stepping up legal action against the family of Italian glass designer Fulvio Bianconi.

Goodison scoops first €10,000 CINOA Prize

07 October 2004

SIR Nicholas Goodison is the winner of the first CINOA Prize, a new award devised by the international confederation of associations of art and antiques dealers.

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Double celebrations for London ceramics duo

29 September 2004

NOW an autumn institution in Kensington, two of the London borough’s top ceramics specialists hold their concurrent annual selling exhibitions from October 5 to 16. Both have something to celebrate.

First under Aqueduct

29 September 2004

A NEW auction house will open for business next week in North Wales. Aqueduct Auctions, named due to its location which is near the famous Thomas Telford Poncyllte Aqueduct, will operate from the Bryn Seion chapel on Station Road in Trevor, near Llangollen.

The Vagabond, starring William Godwin as ‘Stupeo’

29 September 2004

IT was a third edition of 1799, slightly foxed and browned and lacking the half titles, but the copy of George Walker’s novel The Vagabond seen in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of August 19 was in a contemporary calf gilt binding and it sold at £400 (C.R. Johnson).

Local trade out in force

29 September 2004

FOR the third year running, Harrogate-based Galloway Antiques Fairs hold their Gosforth Park Antiques Fair at Brandling House, Newcastle upon Tyne.

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Vettriano officially in Scottish pantheon

29 September 2004

SINCE its first appearance in 1994, Peter McEwan’s Dictionary of Scottish Art & Architecture has been an obligatory presence on the bookshelves of anyone with a serious interest in buying and/or selling Scottish art.

Virgil translated

29 September 2004

FIRST edition copies of John Martyn’s translations of Virgil’s Georgicks (1741) and Bucolicks (1749), both illustrated with coloured plates and maps and bound in contemporary calf, made £500 in a September 17 sale held by John Bellman of Billingshurst.

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Winter landscapes skate away at Christie’s

29 September 2004

PICTURED right is one of Nicolaas Johannes Roosenboom’s (1805-1880) classic winter landscapes, The Pleasure Trip: Elegant figures on Ice, which made €9000 (£6000) at Christie’s Amsterdam (23.205/11.9% buyer’s premium) Pictures Watercolours and Drawings sale on September 1. The signed oil on panel was 23in x 2ft 4in (58 x72cm).

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‘Yellowstone’ Moran’s lucky number comes up in a Reno casino

29 September 2004

COMMISSIONED in 1908 by the Thomas D. Murphy Calendar Co., Mists of Yellowstone, one of many pictures of what is now the Yellowstone National Park region painted by Thomas Moran, nearly doubled the previous saleroom best for the artist on July 29. It made $4.4m (£2.42m) in the grand ballroom of the Silver Legacy Resort & Casino in Reno, Nevada – where Coeur d’Alene Art hold an annual auction, the big event of the year for well-heeled lovers of Western art.

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Specialists recognised with joint appointment

29 September 2004

BONHAMS have named two of their most senior specialists as joint deputy chairmen of the company.

Welsh history continued

29 September 2004

IN rebacked old panelled calf, a 1584 first edition of Welsh historian David Powell’s “corrected, augmented and continued” version of the Historie of Cambria, now called Wales left in manuscript form by Hugh Lhuyd, was sold for £1350 in a Lawrences of Crewkerne sale of July 6.

A natural history selection

29 September 2004

IN Antiques Trade Gazette No.1655, I illustrated a first octavo edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, 1840-44, that sold for $48,000 (£25,920) in a May sale held by Northeast Auctions of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In their August 21-22 sale they had another, half morocco bound and rather better looking set – one originally sold by Clarendon Harris, a book dealer of Worcester, Mass – which made $64,000 (£35,200).